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OBESPIERRE 



A STUDY 



BY 



HILAIRE BELLOC, B.A. 

AUTHOR OF "DANTON," KTC. 



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CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1901 



THE CAXTON PRESS 
NEW YORK. 



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TO THE 

LORD BASIL TEMPLE BLACKWOOD 



PREFACE 



Very often I have sat alone at evening before a fire of 
logs in a room near tlie Rue St. Honor^, and tried to 
call up for myself the great men who from that air 
challenged necessity, and, within the screen of their 
armies, created the modern world. 

There surrounded me upon such occasions the furniture 
of their epoch. My eyes rested upon details that were 
not only in the tradition of the Revolution, but were often 
used and admired when the Convention was sitting ; and 
all about me, in the severe taste of the French bourgeoisie 
and in the paucity of ornament that accompanies a certain 
austere carelessness for fortune, was the atmosphere of 
those lives to which my thoughts continually turned. The 
medium in which I attempted to evoke their shadows was 
their own and was in a fashion my inheritance. About 
me and in my ears was the clear and sounding life of Paris, 
nor was my imagination disturbed by any recent memories 
of privilege, by the sophistries of the modern rich, or by 
the jargon of the evanescent and false philosophies by 
whose aid the academies attempt to escape from the 
traditions of Europe. I was so situated that the justice 
and endurance of the Republic were as evident as material 
things, and I knew without any doubt that the stoical 
temper was, in the fine phrase of a contemporary, the 
permanent religion of humanity. 

My solitude was not unvisited. It was possible in 
Buch a place and with such memories to move in a great 
company, to hear in the streets the rumble of the guns, 
and to see the high palaces of the city full of the people 



viii PREFACE 

conquering. I well imagined Condorcet, that had the 
strength to write, in the extremes of his poverty and 
hiding, so noble a defence of his creed ; I could raise up 
the beauty of St. Just, the indefatigable concentration of 
Carnot, stretched out on the floor of the committee, 
poring with candles over the large maps of the defence. 
There, also, distinct and living beyond the rest, I could 
summon the great figure of Danton, and his good-fellow- 
ship, and his soul that always recalled the Marne and 
that, when it was close to death, could not help remem- 
bering the pleasant country beside Aube. I had some 
communion with the Girondins ; the gravity of Vergniaud, 
the fire of Barbaroux, the sombre anger of Isnard. Across 
these scenes I could follow Marat, that was never him- 
self, and that carried a mad torch without sequel, but 
just avoiding catastrophe. There also were the armies, 
the volunteers thrown out in streams from the gates, the 
return of '95. Or from the trenches the heavy buildings 
of Charleroi would stand against a June dawn, with the 
high, bare land of Fleurus over them, and La Diane, the 
bugle- call, waking the young men out of the trenches to 
the battle. 

Yet these still moved like clouds, unstable, and I 
found at last this insufficiency attaching to such 
reveries, that their images would remain insecure, and 
that the mind arose from them unsatisfied, since they 
lacked stuff and avoided any certain gaze. Had such a 
dreaming reposed upon mere fancies, it would have been 
proper food for poetry or for fiction, but the deeds and 
the men whose story proved so great that it could thus 
rise from the dead were true. The lives had been lived 
and the things done. Then it was not possible to rest 
content in the shadows ; it became necessary to fill out 
the whole truth, and since one was already certain of 
the idea in which all these things were contained, it 
became a business to explore their reality. 



PREFACE ix 

For this there was no refuge but history, and hence 
it became at first a labour, but at last a delight, to build 
them up from innumerable details, and to make of what 
had been fugitive, if grandiose, imaginaries, certain and 
well-guarded possessions. 

In this task a great deal is for the moment 
sacrificed; the high pleasure of mingling with a 
greater past will not, any more than music will, permit 
without injury to itself the contact of industry. The 
dissonance of varying judgments, the domestic incidents 
of heroes, the comic and the grotesque which our 
little minds reject for the sake of the unities but which 
Nature never leaves unmixed with her epics — all these 
disturb and harden. Records divorced from critical 
appreciation, or falsified all out of tune with each other, 
mere praise, mere blame, mere numbers bewilder the 
mind. It is as though our parts were not intended to 
grasp the numberless impressions upon whose integration 
historical truth reposes. 

Nevertheless, the sacrifice repays. It is like the 
growing of slow timber upon a sheltered hill ; you seem 
to have established an enduring thing. There stand 
out at last a vigour and a plenitude that are to the 
unsubstantial origins of such a search what touch, sight, 
and hearing are to memory. Then, when reality is 
reached, it is easy to be sure ; and when so much doubt 
and contradiction are resolved into a united history, the 
continual admission, for the sake of exactitude, of what is 
petty, sordid or fatiguing does but make more human, 
and therefore more certainly true, what had before been 
lyrics or idols. 

Now, there are attached to this method of approaching 
history two features which require an apology. In the 
attempt to fix exactly an historic figure, it is necessary 
first to make the physical environment reappear. In the 
great phrase of Michelet such history must be " a resur- 



X PREFACE 

rection," and there is no resurrection without the resurrec- 
tion of the flesh. In the second place, it is necessary to 
admit laborious and dusty discussion, not only of disputed 
events, but of the inner workings of a mind. It is the 
attempt to achieve either of these ends that gives such 
history as that which I have attempted its burden of 
endeavour. It is the attempt to unite the two which 
lends also to such a book a necessary, but inartistic 
incongruity. I could not illustrate that burden and that 
incongruity better than by referring to the very subject 
of the pages that follow. 

Nothing would be easier than to make a drama of 
the life of Robespierre, were one content to neglect the 
exactitude of historical record. On the other hand, 
nothing would be easier — seeing the enormous amount 
of material that has been accumulated with regard to 
him, the mass of his written work, and the great host of 
witnesses that have left their impression of him for 
posterity — than to write down a voluminous chronicle in 
which the self-contradictions should be stated, but not 
explained, and in which all the sequence of the great 
story and all its poignancy should be neglected. I say 
either of these, the drama or the chronicle, would follow a 
straight road. But when it comes to the combination of 
both, there is imposed a task in which perfection is 
impossible, and whose fulfilment I know will certainly not 
be found in this book. Yet such a combination is the 
first duty of history. 

Let me take an instance, one out of a hundred, of 
what I mean. In the last seven weeks of the Terror, 
when that system had, as it were, passed into frenzy, 
Robespierre was regarded universally as its author and 
kins:. There must be some foundation for a tradition 
which all contemporaries, domestic and foreign, unques- 
tioningly accepted. Nothing could be easier and nothing 
would more satisfy the sense of the dramatic in history 



PREFACE 



XI 



than to present him as the guilty conceiver of an enor- 
mous crime, and to make Thermidor the retribution. 
Turn to the documents of these seven weeks and you 
■will discover that he would not sign the lists of the con- 
demned, that he protested against nearly all the more 
famous of the prosecutions, and that the body directly 
responsible for them, the Committee of PubHc Safety, 
regarded him as a danger; more, you will find that 
the spokesman of that body says that Robespierre 
perished "because he attempted to put a curb on the 
Revolution"; and you will find that those who chiefly 
overthrew him were men determined to push the Terror 
to a further extreme. What is to be made of such a con- 
tradiction ? In fiction such a crux can never arise ; in 
history, and especially in the history of this man, such 
paradoxes are the ordinary material of the story, and 
one may not so correct and omit as to lend the whole 
an artificial simplicity. It is even necessary, in present- 
ing one single figure, not only to admit every record, 
however contradictory, but to analyse, to discuss, and at 
the risk of great tedium, to bolt out the best reading of 
that hidden spring of the mind. 

So much for what is wearisome in the life of Robes- 
pierre. It is the more wearisome because he had but 
one theme, because he could speak of nothing but of that 
theme and of himself, the voice of it, and because the in- 
tricate problem of his rise stands contrasted with the 
plain and terrible scenes whose interest for us to-day is 
still that of an armed combat to men watching from the 
heights. 

And if the necessity of discussion threatens tedium, 
the attempt to recover physical details may introduce 
another danger : it may make the history seem doubtful. 
It will be discovered by my reader that continually 
throughout the following pages I have introduced that 
kind of description which is expected rather in the evidence 



Xll 



PREFACE 



of an eye-witness or in the creations of fiction. I know 
that such an attempt at vivid presentation carries with 
it a certain suspicion when it is applied to history ; I can 
only assure my readers that the details I have admitted 
can be proved true from the witness of contemporaries 
or from the inference which their descriptions and the 
public records of the time permit one to draw. I have 
but rarely illustrated the sources from which they are 
derived, because if this method were made to depend 
upon foot-notes there would be no reading of the book. 

A single instance of the way in which a scene may 
be built up must suffice to excuse their absence ; take 
the impression, in the ninth chapter, of the Committee 
of Public Safety on the night between the 8 th and 
9th Thermidor, and of the dawn coming into the 
room. There are a few accounts of it remaining in 
somewhat contradictory memoirs, but there is no exact 
contemporary description of that scene. How am I 
certain that my own description is true ? Because there 
remains at the observatory in Paris a record of the sultry, 
overcast weather of that morning, and of the increasing 
heat and distant thunder of the day; because Mercier 
has given us the details and the situation of the room ; 
because many men still living have been able to describe 
to me the aspect of the two great halls in the Pavilion 
de Flore ; because one may check upon the map the 
road that Collot and Billaud must have followed from 
the Jacobins do the great staircase of the Tuilleries; 
because we have a record of the exact time when St. Just 
rose to leave, and one can estimate how far the daylight 
was advanced. I could quote fifty places in that one 
page which would each demand a footnote to show from 
whence were drawn the threads of which the whole is 
woven. But I know that the method requires an apology 
and I have therefore presented it in these few lines. 

Finally, I owe it to my readers to disclaim research. 



PREFACE xiii 

The work that remains to be done with regard to Eobes- 
pierre does not lie in the discovery of new documents ; 
there are too many already, and those that would have 
told us most were burnt by Courtois. I say that it 
is impossible to add seriously to the collection of facts 
which M. Hamel made in the course of something 
like a lifetime more than thirty years ago. It is a 
record containing nothing but facts, each one sub- 
stantiated and every document quoted, and it is nearer 
2000 than looo pages long. The work which re- 
mains to be done upon Robespierre is the explanation 
of him. There are the facts in a vast accumulation. 
They contradict each other ; they present a problem 
not only of the greatest intellectual interest, but of some 
considerable moment to those who would comprehend 
the nature and the origin of our modern politics. To 
arrive at the sharp truth with regard to this man, who, 
at the Renaissance of European democracy, was made for 
a few months a kind of god, is to understand perhaps the 
problem which the immediate future presents to us, and 
even if it does not do this, the solution may help us to 
understand the Revolution in which our modern theory 
began. 

To explain that man imperfectly is all I have at- 
tempted. It has been so difficult that (with the ex- 
ception of a slight essay upon the town of Paris) it 
has provided the occupation of two years. Now that 
the work is over I could almost wish that instead of 
wandering in such a desert it had been my task to 
foUow St. Just and the wars, and to revive the memories 
of forgotten valour. 



CONTENTS 



PBEFACE ....... 

I. THE PERSON AND CHAEACTER OF ROBESPIERRE 
II. THE DESCENT AND YOUTH OF ROBESPIERRE 

III. VERSAILLES 

lY. PARIS • 

V. THE WAR 

VI. ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS , . . 

VII. THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE . • 

VIII. THE TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE • 

IX. THE FOUR MONTHS . • • 

X. "thermidor" . • . . • 



PAQB 

vii 

I 

39 

69 

103 

146 

193 

233 

269 
297 

331 



NOTES 

I. ON the authenticity of the " MEMOIRS OF CHARLOTTE 

ROBESPIERRE" ....••• 368 

II. ON CERTAIN SITES MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK . .375 

III. Robespierre's supposed attempt at suicide • •377 



ROBESPIERRE 



CHAPTER I 

THE PERSON AND CHARACTER OF 
ROBESPIERRE 

In presenting the story of Robespierre this must be 
attempted at the outset as a key to the whole: the 
picture of himself. A man of insufficient capacity, bent 
into the narrowest gauge, tenacious of all that statesmen 
least comprehend, and wholly ignorant even of the 
elements of their science, became for a brief time the 
personification of a vast national movement of which 
he was but barely in sympathy with one single aspect, 
and that the least inspiring and the least fruitful. How 
did such a position come to him, and why did it remain 
even for those few months ? This same man, singularly 
ill-fitted to his country, to its traditions and its native 
humour, to its colour, religion, and every essential, fell 
suddenly from power by no general rising of opinion, 
by no discovery of discord between himself and those 
who had worshipped him. He fell by a kind of mighty 
triviality; a small chance of intrigue and conspiracy 
that yet carried in itself much of the fate of our civili- 
sation. How is such a fall to be explained ? 

The secret of his eminence and of his extinction 
lies in himself The men, the circumstances that sur- 
rounded him are well known. The environment of his 

A 



2 ROBESPIERRE 

personality has been fully studied. Every attempt to 
solve the problem of his career from these data has 
failed; every such attempt has but resulted in the de- 
lineation of a caricature, or in the evocation of mere phan- 
tasy. The causes of that supreme elevation and that 
immediate fall do not lie, as they do with the vast 
majority of such historical accidents, in the pressure 
of surrounding things ; they must be sought from within. 
The problem cannot be approached from the standpoint 
of that fierce and open youth which was recasting 
Europe ; the youth from which his concealed activities 
so strangely differed, and which will always be as clear 
and plain as the good daylight. You can solve it only 
by standing where his own soul stood, looking out with 
his own pale eyes to see the bodiless world stretched 
on one unsupported truth, and feeling in yourself, as 
you read, that proximity of fixed conviction to organic 
weakness, which he knew to be his compound, and which 
determined the whole of his life. 

The unravelling of his motives, the establishment 
of his relation to the great movement with which he 
is sometimes erroneously identified, the exact fixing of 
his proportions and capacities are not idle speculations. 
So to present the real man has this double purpose, 
each part of which is full of value : it helps to explain 
the growth and character of symbolic figures in general; 
it presents from a special standpoint the various web 
of the Revolution in particular. A life of Robespierre 
should show of what stuff are made those single- 
thoughted, narrow exponents of a wide enthusiasm 
round whom the legends gather, and who tend to stand 
in history as embodied principles, losing their real selves 
in the effect of time — and in a life of Robespierre there 
should also be apparent that comedy wherein lies the 
artistic interest of the great story of France and 
Europe. 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 3 

The first of these objects, the use of this life as the 
type of so many others, must be left for my book itself 
to develop ; the second, the dramatic value of his career, 
needs a longer apology. 

The combination of unexpected accidents, the failure 
of set plans, the perverse results of fate, the incon- 
gruous roles thrust suddenly upon ill-chosen men, the 
pressure of unseen forces to which society suddenly 
responds, the entry of heroes, and the birth of songs, 
all these make up in history a tapestry of connected 
scenes to which finality alone is lacking, nor is there 
absent any dramatic element that should satisfy the 
mind saving only purpose. Now the best medium 
through which that ceaseless flow of action may be 
viewed is the life of a devotee. 

The noble, sane, and generous leaders of mankind 
lend a false unity to their world and make us partisans 
as we read. The picture of a general period does but 
reflect in one phase or another the general life of man- 
kind, and, as from a superior height, reduces to a normal 
level the accidents of personality. But the mind of the 
enthusiast, especially if he be dried up by the heat of 
his conviction, affords every needed contrast, and one 
appreciates from a low level and in a slanting light 
the high relief of history. For thence you may watch 
the insufficiency of a man to his part, the rude horseplay 
of environment, the expected that fails to arrive — all 
the embroglio. You see the lining of the shield and 
know what kind of thing is at the core of that which 
various trappings turn into a high priest or a king. You 
perceive not only the mechanism of the idol itself, but 
also that thirst for the ideal which creates idolatry, and 
by a long acquaintance with the inner life of one that 
shall succeed and fail in a moment of intense public 
activity, there is half-resolved at last that prime contra- 
diction of political society, whereby enthusiasm, breeding 



4 ROBESPIERRE 

as it does tte most violent ill-judgment, the worst deeds 
and tlie widest deviation from truth and from reality, 
is yet seen to be commingled with that permanent 
appreciation of justice which is at once the divinest 
and the most perilous attribute of the soul. 

Robespierre would have stood much more securely 
in history were he merely of that kind who, in the 
passionate quest for a final state, or in an immediate 
attempt to remedy injustice, come out in the open to 
ruin the conventions and to remodel the permanent 
framework of society. He would not have afforded the 
problem which it is the matter of this book to examine 
if he could be set down at once in the run of the re- 
formers, nor is a thorough knowledge of his life of value 
because it shows the ordinary type of those who lead 
or perfect great movements. It is precisely because the 
phenomenon of his immense popularity and brief hold 
of power is special and peculiar that the study of him 
becomes an appreciation of what makes in human history 
for the high growths of fierce religions and for the persis- 
tent following of symbolic figures. It is as an original 
that he takes the stage. 

There are men upon whom the pretensions of wealth 
and the self-created values of rank work as an irritant 
corrosive ; they feel the primary dignity of man to be 
insulted by such fables, but they feel the insult especially 
as directed against themselves, and in their attempt to 
avenge it they lose proportion, calling in all evils angrily 
to remedy this one. He was not of these. 

There are others in whom the material suffering of 
the oppressed raises so generous an indignation that they 
are willing to pay the penalties of exaggeration and of a 
kind of frenzy, so only they may see righted the gross 
wrong that forbids human bread to the poor. He was 
not of these. 

There are others again who, with the experience of 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 5 

an enslaved nationality, and of its consequence in the 
enslavement of the human will, pursue with ardour for 
years, by every means, the independence of their country, 
an ideal which, under such conditions, is one with that 
of individual freedom. To such, patience and a practical 
mind are commonly granted, and they ultimately achieve 
success by force of arms. He was not of these. 

There are others, far less blessed, in whom the mani- 
fest iniquities of living breed a furious hatred of their 
kind. Yet in them also there burns something of the 
divine, and because it is by evil that their anger is 
aroused, they also reveal God. He was not of these. 

There are yet others in whom the fine rage for a 
normal polity and for equal law, rises at the close of 
some corrupt time and turns them creative ; from these 
proceed, as by an outburst of organic life, new and 
vigorous institutions that preserve the State for genera- 
tions from decay. In the company of the Revolution, 
which could boast, as it were, an army of such men, he 
yet could not count himself of that kind. 

He was divorced from all those spirits who, in what- 
ever form the reaction towards simplicity may possess 
them, are united by a common inspiration, and are 
occupied and driven by the afflatus of some genius; 
instruments of an outer power. What, then, was his 
place among the Revolutionaries whose doctrines waken, 
whose tenacity disturbs, but whose efforts, rising from a 
memory of original right, can therefore remould man- 
kind ? That he is to be reckoned among those who 
thus make starting-points in history no one will take it 
upon his conscience to deny, and unless we admit the 
common error by which he is nothing but a void, an 
emptiness defined by a mass of negatives, it is necessary 
to see the man himself, and, so far as the distance of 
time will permit it, to cause him to appear. 



6 ROBESPIERRE 

It is wisest, in attempting tlie resurrection of a man, 
to follow the natural order of observation and to see him 
physically as all could see him in his time, before one 
seeks out the remote springs of his action, or approaches 
an analysis of his temper. 

In height Robespierre was a little below the medium, 
but this feature, which would not in itself convey an 
impression of insignificance, went with a certain slight- 
ness of build that left him unnoticed unless, by the 
accident of the tribune, he were withdrawn from the 
crowd. His frame was of a delicate mould, his hands 
and feet small and well-shaped, his chest neither broad 
nor deep. He had not that vitality of action which pro- 
ceeds from well-furnished lungs ; neither the voice nor 
the gesture, the good-humour, nor the sudden powers 
that belong to men whose fires have draught to them. 
Indeed his complexion, though clear, was of that pale 
cast which we often associate with a kind of morbidity, 
and he was throughout his youth and public life affected 
with the frequent approach, though never with the con- 
tinuance, of ill-health. The recollection of this pallor 
and of the delicacy of his skin gave rise (when his living 
presence was no longer there to correct the error) to an 
impression of sourness and nervous bile which has vitiated 
most historical descriptions ; for, as will be seen in much 
that follows, his temper was even beyond the common, his 
smile, though cold, was frequent, and his patience firm. 

He had, in common with the whole of that French pro- 
fessional class from which he sprang, a pronounced habit 
of order, a regularity of demeanour, and a very remarkable 
capacity for prolonged mental work ; but this last so tended 
to expend itself upon imaginaries and perpetual deduc- 
tions that he lost the sustenance which it afforded in 
countless other cases to the more practical minds of the 
Revolution ; nor did it produce in him that reaction to- 
wards common things which was so marked in Carnot, 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 7 

and which, had at the end begun to appear in St. Just. 
This appetite for arrangement evoked in his mind a char- 
acter which must be mentioned later ; in his outer life 
it gave him the neatness of dress which has so often 
been justly insisted upon by the historians of the Ke volu- 
tion. He pushed to some excess an amiable vice whereby 
the care of the person was made the special social duty 
of the old regime, and is still preserved in exaggerated 
reverence by the social class of which he formed a mem- 
ber. Moderate as was his expenditure at every period 
of his life, he found the means for a careful wardrobe, 
and devoted a regular portion of his time to its main- 
tenance. In the variety of colours which the age per- 
mitted he chose such as were best suited to his type and 
presence, and, partly from a desire to avoid exaggeration, 
partly from taste, he preferred the sober colours of the 
contemporary fashion of his rank, a warm brown or olive 
green for the colour of his coat. Later he ventured 
upon the brighter colours of '93, and especially upon a 
favourite light blue, which the accident of two dates has 
rendered famous. In the careful elegance of his silk 
stockings, in the buckles which, even after the change 
of fashion in 1792, he continued to wear upon his shoes, 
in his white stock and small lace wristbands, he displayed 
at every point the general taste of his society, but, 
that heightened by a far more scrupulous attention and 
a somewhat greater choice than his neighbours could 
show. It is evident that with such a taste he would 
observe to a detail the conventions of the age in his 
barbering. His brown hair, carefully brushed back and 
standing fully outwards, was powdered with exact and 
daily regularity, and it is related of him that in all the 
vigils and alarms of the last years, even when those 
street battles joined up whole days and made men forget 
sleeping and waking, he was never seen unshaven till the 
awful watch that ended his life. 



g ROBESPIERRE 

Such habits were necessarily accompanied by an 
erect figure, by a rapid though not decided step, and by 
a certain slight vivacity in the movements of the head, 
though he dealt as rarely as any other northerner in the 
language of gesture, being restrained in every attitude 
and careful to preserve his poise. 

When you came to look at his face there was ap- 
parent a peculiar character which engravers and sculptors 
greatly exaggerated after his death, but which a study 
of contemporary painting reduces to juster proportions ; 
it consisted in the prominence of the facial bones and 
a lack of softness in the contours. This measrre hard- 

O 

ness produced no very striking or violent effect, but it was 
sufficiently emphatic to place him, when we call up the 
great gallery which the Revolution affords, in the group 
of over-keen, sharp-featured portraits wherein are found 
also Siey^s, Jean- Bon, Camus, Couthon, and many other 
dissimilar men united only in a common appearance of 
emphasis and precision. 

Such effects as this accident of leanness produced in 
his expression were heightened by details that often 
accompany its presence. Thus the cheek-bones were 
high and formed the broadest part of his face. His 
nose was short, delicate and quite without an arch, his 
lips compressed and thin; and there was an insufficient 
development of the jaw accompanied by a sharpness of 
the chin, which, when his little constant smile was 
absent, lent a somewhat false appearance of bitterness 
to his appearance. The upper part of his face, that the 
hollowness of his cheeks thus threw into relief, was 
remarkable for a feature which the hair-dress of the 
eighteenth century tended indeed to exaggerate, but 
which yet was common to half the public men of the 
time ; I mean the broad, high and retreating forehead 
which seems to promise grasp and rapid reason, but 
which ignores the mysteries and is unacquainted with 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 9 

doubt. You may find it in every profile of all the 
Bourbons, of Diderot, of Voltaire and even of Mirabeau. 
For the rest his head was regular though somewhat 
small, and such impressions as it might afford of in- 
tellectual power, or rather alacrity, were increased by 
an upward holding of it common to men of his inferior 
stature. His words thus reached the whole of an 
assembly, and the direction of his gaze, which was 
commonly above the horizon, added to his carriage an 
air of confidence that was hardly in keeping with the 
attitude of his mind. 

His eyes, whence most his self pierced outward, gave 
immediate evidence of the homogeneity, sincerity and 
circumscription as they did also of the half-unquiet of his 
mind and of its unfittedness for reception. For the slight 
prominence of their brows made them seem deeper set 
and closer together than they really were, but this gave 
no special effect of energy or profundity since their colour 
and a physical weakness in their action modified or 
destroyed their impression. They were peculiarly pale 
and of a neutral greenish grey, not without light but 
quite bereft of brilliance ; so far from possessing that 
command which is common to the vision of those who 
control parliaments, a nervous weakness that caused a 
recurrent trembling in their lids compelled him to the 
use of spectacles when he was at work or when (as was 
his universal habit) he read his speeches. The expression 
of these eyes of his was not unkindly, and it accentuated 
the slight, smiling tension which was the common contour 
of his lips ; but jji over-rajpid_glance that seemed to watch 
upon^ every occasion, gave evidence of what became in 
circumstances of danger an unbalancing habit of suspicion. 
Then, too, he would often raise his forehead in wrinkles 
when he spoke and play ajittle with his fingers. These 
nervous faults that took away so much from his physical 
capacity for dominion were repeated also in certain slight 



lo ROBESPIERRE 

movements of the lower face that gained upon him in 
moments of irritation or of concentrated attention ; as 
though the shght tremor from which his eyes suffered 
provoked a sympathetic action in the facial muscles of 
the jaw. 

But it would be very ridiculous to make of these 
symptoms a principal matter in the picture of Robespierre. 
They were generally absent from his later, as they were 
entirely from his earlier life, and they serve but as indica- 
tions of the manner in which his temperament was 
affected by an extreme success and a corresponding 
danger, for either of which it was utterly unsuited. In 
evidence of this it may be noted that his face was free 
from the lines which constant anxiety or ceaseless 
assiduity drew upon those of his contemporaries, nor 
had he any marked development of such indications of 
character, save in the furrows that flank the mouth and 
that stand commonly for some perception of irony and 
for a habit of self-control. 

I will believe that his voice though somewhat weak 
and possessing no wide range, yet had a power of very 
varied modulation, was sympathetic and clear. It was 
pitched to such a tenor that in the silence generally 
accorded to him it reached with exact articulation to the 
furthest recesses of the galleries in the Menus Plaisirs, or 
even in the vast oval of the Manage. But whenever 
a hubbub arose he was quite unable to meet it, and 
would either endure till it had passed or succumb to it 
as to a physical oppression. In the open air, when there 
were no walls to make a sounding-board, he could hardly 
be heard. In all this he differed widely from those whom 
he supplanted, from Mirabeau and Danton, whose deep, 
loud voices could fill an open arena, and in any closed 
and violent debate could sound like large bells above a 
gale. If there was any other thing to help the success 
of his oratory beside the clarity of articulation and the 



PERSON AND CHARACTER ii 

pitch to whicli I have aUuded, it lay in the reputation 
that a small surrounding of friends had made for his 
manner ; a reputation inherited from his half-literary 
youth in college and at Arras, where it is indubitable 
that he had exercised a permanent if exiguous charm, 
and one that Carnot, Le Bas, Desmoulins or the Roberts 
would certainly remember. 

Such in general, then, is the picture one must take 
with one in following his adventure and tragedy. A 
figure slight but erect and sufficiently well filled, a little 
dainty and always exquisitely fitted, not disdainful of 
colour but contemptuous of ornament, he maintained to 
the end those externals which had been the enamel of 
the old society ; shaming, astonishing or irking the sick 
slipshod of a Marat, the casual rough negligence of a 
Danton, the dust of maps and floors that soiled a sleep- 
less Carnot, the common tongue of a Hebert or the 
guard-room coarseness of a Hanriot. We must see his 
small, set and pointed, but open and somewhat lifted face 
developing in the course of a stress for which he was not 
made and which a nascent ambition could alone compel 
him to suffer, some growing nervousness of manner. His 
pale complexion upon whose temples and forehead the 
veins would show, his blonde, grey-green, short-sighted, 
luminous but weakening eyes, his lips compressed and 
thin, but often set to an expression of advance or atten- 
tion, his large retreating forehead, his reserve of gesture 
— all these form the expression of which a voice some- 
what high and tenuous but not without attraction was 
the organ. 

He passes up the Revolution as in his physical gait 
he passed up the gangway of the parliament: rapidly, 
but not over decidedly; lacking, apparently, the power 
of controlling others, but with the constancy of attitude 
that proceeds from strict limitations and with a singular 
fixity of carriage, A man, with all this, absorbed in the 



12 ROBESPIERRE 

effort after form, possessed of a considerable literary am- 
bition, pale, insufficient, exact, laborious, he does not seem 
much more than the successful and locally prominent 
county lawyer, a trifle pedantic but enjoying a sound con- 
nection of justly admiring and somewhat unimpressive 
friends ; one that, entering politics, might draft or criticise, 
but that could hardly attract a general observation. 

This he should have been, and such things he should 
have done. What did he ? 

He held first a group, then a great political machine, 
then a sovereign assembly, and at last a nation, attentive. 
He became the title and front of the republic : the kings 
regarded him ; he put some fear into the priests ; the armies 
converged upon his tenement; the general run of European 
society stood aghast at his supposed enormities ; the most 
generous, the most practical, and the most violent of the 
great Reformers alike insisted upon his bearing their 
standard ; he may become for the martyrs and prophets 
of complete democracy an idol, as he has already become 
their legend. Whence did this astonishing contrast be- 
tween his native, probable career and his actual fate pro- 
ceed ? It proceeded from the fact that his character 
contained a something which the special nature of the 
time craved, which it insisted upon and would not aban- 
don. That something was but one factor of his whole 
temperament, it might have lain dormant though it could 
never have been atrophied, but certainly it would have 
suffered neglect in ordinary times, and with that neglect 
he would himself, in ordinary times, have remained 
contented. 

To discover this hidden and permanent part of him 
which the Revolution deified, it is necessary to examine 
what inner temper accompanied or gave rise to the exter- 
nals I have described, and such a task I shall now under- 
take : to show the mind that made this body. 

The character of Robespierre is contained in these 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 13 

two connected facts : First, that lie was a man of the old 

r^crime divining nothing outside of it, undisturbed by 

that germinating of the future which worked in and 
troubled the great minds around him, and threw an 
energy of travail into their splendid tragedy; secondly, 
that he had to an inhuman, or (if the word be preferred) 
to an heroic, degree the potentiality of intense conviction ; 
for God had given him a kind of stone tabernacle within 
the soul where he could treasure absolute truths and this 
tabernacle remained impregnable. 

Of these two qualities I would speak in their order. 
It was uniquely because Robespierre was a man of the 
old rc^gime that he received so unquestioningly the philo- 
sophy which that world produced for its own destruction, 
and his strict confinement to this society it was that made 
him so universally accepted as the leader of its exodus. 
Men full of the time to come suffered from the suspicion 
that attaches to whatever is strange; Danton was too 
much inspired by the future realities, the creations of 
the revolution ; the Girondins were too much up in the 
light outside their time and their world. But for Robes- 
pierre every trick that wearies us now, every detail which 
we reject as faded in colour or stilted in design, was part 
of a political fortune. His long classical allusions, his 
well-apportioned phrases, the symbolism that seems tinsel 
to us now, were the very air of that time ; it was thought 
a sound mark in a man that he should unconsciously 
accept such habits always. They were to his generation 
what wordy compromises, the allusive style, the pretence 
of knowledge, and the jargon of science are to ours ; — 
things which a man rejects to his interior and lasting 
good, but to his immediate hurt; things which make 
easy and successful the lives of those who do not perceive 
or who are content to forget their triviality. Of such 
advantage is it never to have passed the gates of one 
city. 



14 ROBESPIERRE 

It is a necessity proceeding from the very nature of 
change that each period of a definite colour and temper, 
while making an ideal perhaps of things long past, 
despises the epoch immediately preceding it. So the 
fifth century saw nothing but vileness in the sunset of 
the gods, drew up a baleful legend to condemn the 
memory of Julian, broke the statues in the gardens of 
Lutetia, and threatened even our immemorial worship of 
wells and trees. So the Renaissance neglected altogether 
and left for dead the exquisite last of the Gothic ; planted 
Goujon's caryatides upon the green walls of Philip 
Augustus and dominated the roofless turrets and the 
crumbling machicolations of the old Louvre under the 
high pride of an Italian palace. So we, who retrace the 
pointed windows, yearn for the perfumes, the visions 
and the colours, and even in our every political creation 
do but recreate — whether we know it or not — the middle 
ages, are amused or more often disgusted by the great 
century from which we sprang. But if we are to com- 
prehend the Revolution which was the outcome of that 
century, especially if we are to appreciate a character 
so steeped in the influence of that time, it is necessary 
to lose a little of this modern aversion and to love a little, 
if we are to understand it, the generation which used 
"Liberty" as a password or a talisman, and which by 
the arms of America and France, by the economic science 
of England created our own time. 

What was that generation, and where can its influ- 
ence still be found ? 

I should be ungrateful to the forest of Marly and 
to the stone basin hung with silence, were I to forget 
the men whose shadows can still startle us at evening 
or the impress of the great kings. The genius of these 
woods does not pass, or if it passes, passes in a slow 
transformation that infinitely exceeds the hurried move- 
ments of men and that lives the slow life of the sacred 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 15 

trees. It would seem as though the presence of the 
dead were native to the undergrowth and the neglected 
lawns, and as though whatever power preserves the past 
in its peculiar places, worked with a greater mastery 
under the veil of loneliness and sleep. Here the rare 
echoes are returned as though from a grave space of 
years, the springs have an older gaiety, the autumns a 
sadness more majestic, the summers are more profound, 
the winters have a more Saturnian brooding because 
Time mingles with them all : and the half-forgotten 
human minds from whose clear vision proceeded, and 
in the framework of whose society was formed the chief 
enterprise of politics, visit these places again, I think, for 
their influence is certainly to be discovered here. 

Nor here only : the courtiers whom Voltaire de- 
lighted, the women whose eyes caught the new 
enthusiasms of humanity, the swords and the youth 
that were to marshal the great wars, are found — or 
something more than their memories is found — wherever 
the scrolled gates and the severe avenues still lead to 
unspoilt manors. There is a great house by the pleasant 
and misty Orge upon the way to Orleans, in whose noble 
rooms or by the shores of whose wide and secret lake you 
may discover that spirit alive ; there is in the meadows 
of the Boutonne in the western Pastures, haunted and 
alone, an inn where the Girondins held their table for an 
evening as they went up towards Paris and their re- 
public in the declining summer of '91 ; everywhere 
France preserves, exterior to and higher than, the limits 
of change, the walls and the gardens to which these men 
can return. 

By such influences my own childhood and youth 
were in part surrounded. Even after a hundred years 
something in the flesh remained of it. Remote and 
secluded, there were characters which held to the 
tradition: women from whom I heard of their fathers 



1 6 ROBESPIERRE 

in the guard of the Palace, and men strictly formed in 
what had once been the new stoicism of the Emile and 
fixed and anchored backwards to the legend of Diderot 
and the hard crystal of the Encyclopaedia. I should, 
then, be able to show what influences they were that 
trained the early manhood of Robespierre ; what that 
generation was whose every impress he received and of 
whose salvation in Rousseau it was his in particular to 
make an exalted and irrefragable creed. 

Of that society, the heirs and executors of so vast 
and changeful a past, the main imprint was leisure. By 
which I mean, not the leisure which wealth or a secure 
pride convey — pride was but in a powerless few, wealth 
was rare and attached often to a mere office. I mean 
that the entire framework of the old regime presupposed 
and compelled repose and the spontaneous action of the 
mind. The least instructed of the poor, the most un- 
balanced and cynical of the rich alike moved in an 
atmosphere of economic protection, of custom and of 
set tasks. The eager competition that accompanies 
the rare re-births of history, that spurred the twelfth 
and the sixteenth centuries, that has enfevered and 
exhausted our own generation, was absent even from the 
conception of the men who preceded the Republic. And 
if a large repose was the lot (as it was the lot) even of 
wretched peasants who lacked bread and wine, still more 
was it the moulding condition of the professional class 
into which the vigour, the honesty, and the initiative of 
the nation had gathered. There was thrown over them 
as over the nobles, but over them with a more creative 
effect, the invariable and perhaps beneficent effect of 
ample room and quiet hours. In their art they pro- 
duced or admired the mists of early morning, the faces 
of young girls, the charming promises of April ; in their 
music simple and enduring cadences, airs rather than 
harmonies; in their letters, the subtle values of exact 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 17 

phrase appeared. They enjoyed that unconscious agree- 
ment with their mould, that plenitude of satisfaction 
which, since it releases the mind from the rasp of effort, 
fires it for direct creations, and fits it to overthrow the 
very environment which it thinks eternal. Nothing in 
the Revolutionaries more startles our moderns than this, 
that they took for granted so much and had so many 
dogmas. Yet it was partly the same spirit which forbade 
even the fashions to change until the whole flood of 
the new world had broken; just when that generation 
was fullest of Nature, just then it would have seemed 
to them rank madness to have grown a beard. 

The Professionals then — to whom of course Robes- 
pierre belonged — were compelled by the conditions of 
their time to use intellects which no stress fatigued : 
they sought principles, and leisure discovered philosophy. 
The sentiment and the genial civilisation of their lives 
made them accept that Philosophy as absolutely as they 
accepted their social conventions. 

Partly their education (classical, severe, scholarly, 
instinct with Rome), but much more the huge moral 
deficit of the time, the great social debt that demanded 
payment, and by which Europe had swung out from 
the normal, turned that Philosophy into the channel of 
politics, and at last this phenomenon was apparent in the 
rank where some great nobles, many squires and all the 
lawyers mingled — that they had in their leisure returned 
to the abstractions which are at the base of political 
science. Their art and music had tinged those abstrac- 
tions with a colour of sensitive affection; the spectacle 
of a world visibly decaying from the effect of political 
inequality had lent passion to their convictions, had 
made them regard this faith of theirs as a kind of water 
of youth, and their very conventionality had left the 
mind free to create a new society upon the plan of their 
creed. 



1 8 ROBESPIERRE 

This tide of influence threw up upon its crest the 
fame and the influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau. 
With the mention of his name a long digression is 
necessary, for it was he who cast into an exact mould 
and forged into permanent form the demand of the 
eighteenth century. It was given to him alone to 
restate with exactitude and power the universal theory 
of the State : it was of Rousseau dead that the genera- 
tion of the Revolutionaries made themselves apostles, 
and it was of Rousseau's formula that Robespierre in 
especial made something, as it were, divine : a unique 
and permanent revelation of the perfect state. 

The state may be explained or left unexplained. It 
commonly seems of little moment to the security of 
its order and of less to the happiness of its citizens 
whether its analysis be attempted or no, for it is evident 
that our human nature makes (as it is made by) society, 
and that we live in our own country as in a native and 
necessary air. Nevertheless it will ever be the attempt 
of men, since men are also reasonable, to develop and 
maintain some explanation of their arrangements, and 
to discover those first principles upon which obedience to 
a rule and the nature and limits of political authority 
are founded. And this attempt springs from two sources : 
first, that the eager and doubtful mind of man, conscious 
of the divine within it, and therefore malcontent with 
the mysteries and limitations by which it is surrounded, 
will not rest from attacking and resolving the disturbing 
complexity of its environment ; this spontaneous force of 
the intellect is the source of the social as of every other 
philosophy, and is the prime and noblest mobile of political 
inquiry. The second source of such a science is more 
immediate and practical. It resides in the necessity 
which change produces for some standard of continuity. 
How is this new condition or that unusual combination 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 19 

of circumstances to be met without a disarrangement of 
our social tradition and without offence to that sense of 
justice in whose satisfaction alone humanity can repose ? 
We cannot answer these new questions unless we have 
arrived at some clear principle from whose application to 
the modern circumstance a special rule may be deduced. 
Such and such an institution by its very age seems to have 
introduced a new offence into living ; we are in danger of 
confusing things and ideas, we are disturbed and feel a 
necessity of correcting back to a normal outline the ex- 
crescences of time. But in what measure are we to act ? 
Are we in a particular case to abolish, to reform, or to 
reinvigorate ? We cannot tell unless there have been laid 
down some few clear absolutes by which the condition of 
that institution may be judged. This practical need, the 
need which gives rise to codes and is reflected in ritual 
phrases, is the second origin of political theory, and so 
true is it that humanity cannot finally escape its action 
that the very men who most affect to despise meta- 
physical definitions, and who are most proud to pin 
themselves to custom for the regulation of their country, 
are themselves, in that sanctification of mere habit, 
proposing a tremendous dogma of universal application 
by which some few states have outlasted fevers, but a 
hundred have been bled to death and finally de- 
stroyed. 

I have said that the eighteenth century of its nature 
was impelled by the first of these forces ; it tended to 
philosophise. Physical discoveries akeady sufficient to 
excite were not yet so numerous nor so wide in range as 
to confuse the deductive powers of the mind ; and, as I 
have said, order and a kind of artificial quiet which 
brooded over the ruins of the old world commanded the 
minds of men for whom manual labour and economic 
strain were alike unknown, to examine and define them- 
selves. Moreover the period possessed this mark of high 



20 ROBESPIERRE 

abstraction, that its speculation covered all tlie field of 
thought, and that no one was content till he had linked 
up the various provinces of inquiry into a united system. 
Locke that wrote of government, also made education a 
hobby, and coloured all he wrote by his cold appreciation 
of the sequence of ideas ; Rousseau that wrote of govern- 
ment, also made education a hobby, and coloured all he 
wrote by his instinctive and passionate regret for a lost 
simplicity. 

But if the eighteenth century would of itself, by its 
quality of leisurely decay, have framed philosophies, and 
in framing them would necessarily have devised for its 
intellectual satisfaction a theory of the State, there was 
also and especially present in it what I have called the 
second source of political science. It was in extreme 
need of a guide and standard for reform. 

It is not a necessary accompaniment of secular change 
that this need should be felt, though it is an invariable 
effect of time that such a need should exist ; but our 
western Europe by the great historical accident which 
makes it the evident head of the world not only felt the 
need of, but suffered the actual demand for, reform. It 
not only knew that it was sick; it also conceived an 
appetite for health. For our civilisation has, above all 
others, great diversity of parts coupled with clear and 
united memories; the soul of Europe is one, personal and (it 
would seem) unaffected by time ; its body is differentiated 
to excess, and bears a thousand marks of a changing 
historical environment. From the complexity of its 
structure and the variety of its origins proceed those 
anomalies which threaten at great intervals to destroy it ; 
but from its principle of unity and from its consciousness 
of itself Europe perceives and combats the approach of 
its own dissolution. The thread is never lost, the basis 
of equilibrium is not forgotten. We preserved in the 
darkness of the ninth century as in the troubling 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 21 

glory of the sixteenth the terminology, the method of 
thought, the mode of beauty, and the main conquests 
of the mind which we had inherited through those 
thousand years ; we have still in Europe one language, 
and even our shrines are the same. 

A hundred years ago it Avas not a local trouble of 
invasion nor a passing mania for wasting our energies 
in deserts, nor even the rebellion of a part against the 
whole that threatened us, but something graver and more 
universal. The whole fabric of Europe was in a dis- 
location between its outer self and the ideas upon which 
that self reposed. It is true to say that the supernatural 
had never disappeared so nearly from the western mind 
— yet never had the social institutions raised upon the 
recognition of the supernatural absorbed more wealth 
or supported a more dangerous luxury. Land was 
owned as the Romans owned it, men thought of that 
ownership as absolute — yet the terms, the expensive 
formulae, the irritant conventions attaching to land were 
still feudal, and an absolute dominion was dealt with as 
though it were a tenure. The conceptions of punishment 
and restraint were those of a society whose central organi- 
sation, homogeneity, and facile communications permit a 
certain mild and consistent pressure — yet the criminal 
courts of Europe retained (though they tampered with) 
the crude violence that accompanies insecurity and that 
punishes by vengeance the palpable crimes of primitive 
and isolated communities. A hundred examples might 
be given of the tension which racked Europe as the 
populations awoke to these anomalies. One more enor- 
mous than all the rest overshadowed and menaced her. 
We, the makers or the heirs of the Christian theory 
and the Roman law, had lapsed into the grossest 
form of inequality. A du*ect domestic power, mixed 
and disguised here and there with an indirect and 
economic control, gave to an ill-defined oligarchy the 



22 ROBESPIERRE 

privilege of an isolated control. Tiiat privilege was 
accompanied always by ignorance of human conditions, 
often by insolence, sometimes by a glaring contrast be- 
tween the man and his pretensions — yet it coexisted with a 
mode of thought that spoke of humanity in the general, 
with a theory of jurisprudence drawn from the strict 
egalitarianism of the Eoman Code, and commonly with 
the political importance of the nobles. 

The century at its very opening set out under the 
guidance of Locke to perfect an instrument of remedy 
which a hundred years of discussion had already freed 
from custom and confusion. It formularised and made 
familiar a prime theory of the State. Before its first 
generation was grown old the educated and articulate 
part of Europe had universally consented to repeat a 
species of creed, to admire a rational basis for the State, 
to give a reply in legal form to every question of political 
right, and to every interpellation against authority. They 
explained the machinery of society by the legal metaphor 
of contract or mutual obligation, and deduced from this 
definition the clearest ruleS for legislation and the most 
logical excuses for the exercise of governmental power. 

There still lingers in our academies a debate as' to 
whether the men of the eighteenth century chose the 
right metaphor wherein to express the fundamental 
truths of politics. The debate is but an irrelevant and 
tedious discussion of nomenclature, worthy of the atmos- 
phere in which it flourishes. There exists a true theory 
of the State which has everywhere been accepted, and is, 
in many forms, the starting point of all political know- 
ledge. We differ as to the best form of the executive ; 
as to the best machinery for connecting that one function 
with the whole ; as to the proper mode and extent of the 
exercise of legislative power. We differ upon the reality and 
value of local characteristics, and upon the practical effect 
of special reforms; but we are agreed that sovereignty 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 23 

must ultimately reside in tlie community, that subjection 
to an equal law is the condition of citizenship, that the 
governed are normally a part of government. These 
truths, which the noblest of English documents has called 
" self-evident," may be expressed as being part of the 
nature of man, as being a reflection of the divine plan, 
or they may be yet more precisely laid down and be 
made capable of more exact deductions by the use of 
mathematical or legal metaphors. But whether the 
organic, the theological, or the contractual method be 
used, the end is the same, though each is fitted to 
special problems. They are all but indirect ways of pre- 
senting what escapes direct definition : that there must 
in a normal and living state be a circulation of power 
from the individual to the community, and through the 
executive of the community back to the individual again ; 
that the moral right of government reposes upon an 
implied consent, and that a state is in its fullest perfec- 
tion only when the interior liberty or balance which 
makes us self-dependent beings is in part transformed 
into an exterior and civic liberty of the whole. 

The men of the eighteenth century, inheriting a 
certain tradition of phrase and needing something applic- 
able and direct, used the legal expression of this truth, 
and chose to express its nature by the parallel of a 
CONTRACT of association or employment. 

So insistent was the approaching call for change that 
the precision of the terms in which politics should be de- 
fined increased with every treatise : became the test of 
every opinion. A standard of strict regularity and of 
the utmost simplicity was felt in that time to be not 
only consonant to the clarity of its thought, but necessary 
to the terrible work which refused to be delayed. The 
second generation of the century, the men whose activi- 
ties coincided with the Seven Years' War and the 
lethargy of France, the rise of the cabinet system in 



24 ROBESPIERRE 

England, had heard no other than the legal form of 
social science, and would have regarded as merely bar- 
barous other theories than that which now explained 
so easily the nature of the State ; nor, however much they 
differed upon the results of its application, could men of 
the most opposite camps conduct even a quarrel save in 
terms of the Social Contract. 

The third generation, the men who had Louis XVI. 
for a contemporary, came under an influence that 
directed and in part produced the Revolution; for the 
general philosophy and trend of the century was gathered 
up, woven, stamped by the genius of Rousseau. The 
nature of his influence is very commonly ignored, yet to 
ignore it is to miss the very spirit of the Revolution. 
Rousseau may be said to have grasped all the material 
of the time and to have worked in it that mysterious 
change whereby the inorganic clusters into organic form, 
lives and can produce itself. The wit, the irony, the 
indignations of the eighteenth century, the certitude also 
that was at their root, he, whose wit was peevish and slight, 
and whose indignation tearful, transformed from vague 
inanimate passions into a kind of personality that could 
will and do. Thus he who could be said to have 
fashioned nothing yet created something, and without the 
power to discover or to frame he had that rare inexplic- 
able mastery by which breath is blown into the clay. 

It is useless to ask whence such a peculiar force pro- 
ceeded, as it is useless to analyse the poets. It is enough 
to note the great evidences of it that appeared not only 
in his work but in the vast effects which that work pro- 
duced. In his sincerity, his backward yearning for a 
past Eden, his inhuman sensitiveness at the contact of 
the world, he had all the character of the men that 
impel the origins of religions and he was found (after not 
a little ridicule) to be the agent of a mission. Moreover, 
all this chiefly shone in the talent peculiar to such rare 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 25 

forerunners, for this prophet under the searching and 
withering hght of an intense rationalism was granted 
what none of those cynics or well-poised critics of his 
had known — the living word. Those who least compre- 
hend his influence are those who least apprehend the 
value of his medium : the direct force and ultimate keen 
edge of the French phrase. Men who profess astonish- 
ment at the spell he threw over the nation are like for- 
eigners who misread half our own history because they 
cannot weigh the power that the Jacobean translation 
of the Bible has exercised over the English race. 

This man did many things to the innumerable youth 
that succeeded and attempted to fulfil his plan. He 
touched them with extravagant simplicities, filled them 
with uncontrollable angers against injustice — angers that 
blundered against the unnecessary balance of things. He 
bequeathed to them, more than is fitted for the humour 
and doubts of this world, an angry gift of tears. Most 
ignorant of childhood, he propounded for them fantasies 
of education in which the brooding evil of mankind was 
passed aside, yet, child-like and a dreamer, he inspired 
them with a power of vision. Because of him there 
were landscapes in the Revolution, and Nature, her dis- 
tances and her infinite moods, ran, from his sources, 
through the tramping of their armies and the whirlwind 
of their debates. But one thing in especial he did 
beyond all these. In the shortest of his pamphlets, the 
" Contrat Social," he fixed in little adamantine clauses the 
political creed which men demanded. 

That system has been identified with what we loosely 
call democracy. The identification is inappreciative and, 
on the whole, erroneous. What Rousseau wove together 
as the ultimate political expression of his time was a body 
of exact arid correlated assertion deduced from this prime 
truth that what is common to all men is utterly beyond 
the accidents by which they differ, as in mathematical 



26 ROBESPIERRE 

science one dimension is beyond and infinitely contains 
the last — as a solid exceeds a plane. So the Church has 
spoken of souls ; so the Empire had written of citizens. 
Government to be government of right, proceeded from 
the union of such units, which, but for their union, could 
not be. That corporate entity, the Nation, had a Will, and 
the expression of that Will was the Law. So Rousseau, 
within limits that could afford to be exisfuous because the 
material he used was imperishably hard, devised the 
political formula that was to remould Europe. 

Upon these postulates and by the trumpet of a 
marvellous prose he proclaimed the Reform, and fixed 
in the minds of his contemporaries definitions of political 
right. As it was into a political channel that the public 
need was more and more urgently directed, this political 
Right soon seemed the whole of Right ; its establishment 
and defence acquired the force and quality of a religion. 
The whole community was to be, manifestly and ex- 
plicitly, the Sovereign; the executive was to become 
openly and by definition its servant ; the vague thesis of 
equality, upon which jurisprudence reposed, was brought 
with exactitude and vigour into every detail, and made a 
test of every law ; the limits of individual liberty were to 
be enlarged till they met for boundary the general liberty 
of all. 

And yet, as I have said, there did not flow from this 
system the institutions which we associate with our 
modern overtoppling states. He postulated no crude 
machinery of majorities, he saw that government by 
deliberation was free in proportion as the community 
was limited and its life autarchic, growing its own corn. 
He made a faith in God and in immortality the necessaries 
of a happy nation. He wisely suspected representative 
bodies, that commonly proceed from, that always tend 
toward, and that can only vigorously coexist with pluto- 
cracy. Alone of his time he had the intuition that self- 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 27 

government demands uncliangeable and fundamental laws, 
and by the unconscious vision of such minds he perceived 
what history now proves of enduring societies, that such 
a constitution was more lasting if it came from beyond the 
wall and was imposed by an accepted "law-giver" who 
could resfard the state from without and embrace it as a 
whole. So Etruria gave Rome her religion and so the 
forgotten message came from Crete to the Hellenes. He 
presupposed no republic though he made of kingship 
and all its parallels a magistracy ; and he admitted in his 
age what his youth had denied and what all should per- 
ceive in ideal systems, that men are a little too prone 
to sin for such simplicity to preserve a facile existence. 

Such was the development of political theory in the 
eighteenth century, and such was the most famous 
exponent of its system when, eleven years before the 
opportunity for its application arrived, Rousseau that 
had survived to read the Declaration of Independence, 
died and became a god. 

I have dealt at this length with the politics of the 
time and with the organ they produced, because the 
tragedy with which this book is concerned is political. 
I return to the character of Robespierre and take up 
again its main condition — that he was a man of the old 
regime. A man so utterly the product of his day could 
not but accept all this political standard as a mathe- 
matical truth, nor could he help revering its exponent as 
the seer and guide of a necessary change. 

He took the first postulates of the " Contrat Social " 
for granted, knowing well that every one around him did 
the same. He deduced from them, and still deduced 
with a fatal accuracy of process, with a fatal ignorance 
of things, and with no appreciation of the increasing 
chances of error, until his deductions had departed pro- 
digiously from their starting point, and began to prove 



28 ROBESPIERRE 

themselves in every practical application absurd. The 
resistance which such absurdities met he thought to be 
a wilful rejection of strict logic, due to the corruption 
of private motives or to the casuistry of wicked men. 
In such a path, wholly of the mind and divorced from 
reality, his being was absorbed. 

When we say that _E,obesj)ierre was entirely a „man 
of his time, it means, of course, far more than this accep- 
tation of the one political creed. It means the bright 
dress, the busy attitude, the Latin training, the pedantry 
of classical allusion which I have already mentioned, 
and which will appear very evidently in his actions. It 
means also that there was inherited in him, and that 
he was reminiscent of, the charm which clung like a 
September mist to the society of even his rank — for that 
rank was nearly noble. A certain bearing and manner, 
a certain carefulness in his relations with the world, were 
part of the toilet and the phraseology to which he had 
been born. This, which the glory of the Revolution 
obscures, it is imperative that any student of his life 
should remember, for as the turbulence and frenzy of 
'93 proceeded, his ordered figure almost shone against 
a scene of so much disorder. His absorption in his own 
rank and generation involved all this; but though he 
must always be imagined coloured with the special habits 
of his environment, it is yet the atmosphere of political 
dogmatism whose origin I have examined at such length, 
which must be chiefly retained when one considers him 
in history. It was this political atmosphere that Robes- 
pierre breathed, and thought the mere natural air of the 
world. He was hardly born when the famous pen was 
moulding the details of the " Contrat Social " ; when first 
he could speak the lawyers of the country towns were 
making it their talk. The stagnant security of provin- 
cial life that never fails to exaggerate the characteristics 
of its generation, that turns the social code into a deca- 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 29 

logue, tliat solemnly retains the chance example of the 
rich, and that ignores the cynicism with which a capital 
can temper its enthusiasms ; the unlaughing temper of 
a decaying family pride ; the effect of early scholastic 
interests, and of college prizes, and of his masters' praise ; 
the decent drawing-rooms of middling wealth ; the vague 
but continual adulation of contented elders and obscure 
women — all these make any man not possessed of dis- 
quieting vigour sink into the hardest rut of his time, and 
Robespierre long before his thirtieth year had taken 
every phrase of the coming reform as unquestioningly as 
a discovery in physical science or a new process in 
geometry. 

Now there were in France, and for that matter 
throughout Europe, thousands of men to whom the 
accidents of that generation were as native, and its 
political creed as unquestioned as they were to Robes- 
pierre. What, then, lifted him out from all those 
thousands whom in even mediocrity of "vision he largely 
resembled ? It was the second and much rarer character 
which I gave him at the head of this analysis : that what- 
ever he held, he held it with incredible tenacity, and 
that he had in his mind an impregnable fortress wherein 
he preserved his convictions unalterable. 

Those whom it is customary in soft times to call 
fanatics are of two kinds. There is he who maintains 
what he very well knows to be incapable of positive 
proof, and very far from being a self-evident proposition 
— as, that the Book of Mormon fell from heaven, that 
Pinkish Elephants are alone of animals divine, or that 
some chief or king is descended from a Bear, The 
fanatic that would convince others of these truths will 
sometimes threaten with the sword, or be at the pains 
of working wonders to prove them ; but most commonly 
it is by an earnest advocacy and by the power of insis- 
tent repetition that he will convert his hearers to accept 



30 ROBESPIERRE 

his vision. It is his glory that the thing he premises 
has in it something wholly unusual, and he praises it 
as a chief virtue in his proselytes that they accept reality 
by the channels of affection and appreciation rather than 
by those of comparison and experience. Robespierre was 
emphatically not of this kind. 

But there is a second kind which has often, oddly 
enough, a more irritant effect upon humanity than the 
first. They attach themselves to some principle which is 
or highly probable, or generally acceptable, or even self- 
evident, and armed with this truth, which few care (and 
sometimes none are able) to deny, they proceed to a 
thousand applications of their rule which they lay down 
as an iron standard, crushing the multiple irregularities 
of living things. Of these it has been well said that 
they go to the devil by logic. It is in their nature to 
see nothing of the mysteries, and to forget that the 
aspects of truth must be co-ordinated. They do not 
remember that the Divine Nature in which all truths 
are contained and from which all proceed, has not as 
yet been grasped by the human mind, and they fail to 
perceive at how prodigious a rate the probability of 
divergence increases as deduction proceeds step by step 
from its first base in principle. Yet so strong is the cur- 
rent of deduction in us that when such fanatics most 
disturb and torture us by their practical enormities we 
are for ever reproaching ourselves with the unreason- 
ableness of our instinctive opposition, and thinking, as 
their system reposes on a truth and is consistent, that 
therefore its last conclusions may not be denied ; and it is 
this weakness in us that gives fanatics of the latter sort 
their power. Of this kind were the lawyers of the later 
middle ages, of this kind are the defenders of many 
modern economic theories, and of this kind was Robes- 
pierre. 

The man who believes in this fashion and who applies 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 31 

his belief as this sort of conviction impels him, displays 
many secondary characteristics which, when we have noted 
them (and added some personal accidents to complete 
the picture) will put before us in its larger lines the 
singular temper of Robespierre. Thus he will have an 
appearance of conceit or vanity, but that appearance will 
be misleading; for it is not the ordinary man's simple 
repose in self — it is his devotion to the obvious, his 
knowledge that he is absolutely consistent, that makes 
Robespierre an egotist. No man, almost, in history so 
incessantly haunted his audience with his repeated per- 
sonality — but he certainly imagined that he was but 
emphasising the equality of men, the immortality of the 
soul, and all the other connected dogmas of the perfect 
State. He was infinitely suspicious and for ever seeing him- 
self abandoned — but it was because he was quite certain 
of his truths, and was convinced (generally with reason) 
that others less single-minded than himself were acting 
against what they knew to be political justice. It was 
not he but justice that stood alone in the hall; his 
opponents were opposing not him but self-evident and 
conspicuous truth. 

Again, this unique conviction destroyed humour and 
proportion. Did he hear a gibe against his wearisome 
insistence ? It seemed to him a gibe against the liberty 
and the God whom he preached. He missed relative 
values, so that he was iu politics like a man who in 
battle has no sense of range ; he blundered unexpectedly 
upon oppositions; he shot short or over the heads of 
opponents. By as much as matters were removed from 
his immediate handling he judged them wildly — I mean 
in practical affairs. Thus his handling of the Jacobins 
was admirable and uniformly successful, of the Parlia- 
ment generally so, of the Provinces and Paris somewhat 
uncertain, of foreign affairs puerile ; nor did he in any 
single instance that I can recall perceive the ultimate and 



32 ROBESPIERRE 

practical consequences of a decree launched on an exist- 
ing and complex society; lie was content to judge each 
law of itself by the touchstone of the One Truth. 

But the converse is also true, and this is a matter 
not sufficiently seized in the general wonder at his 
success. In proportion as things were quite near him 
and of his own audience he understood them. He had 
proved himself a successful advocate before '89 — after 
it he can be shown to have watched faces well and to 
have gauged the temper of crowds. He rode the 
Jacobins, and time and again could steer the Parlia- 
ment when others failed. I will even believe that but 
for the singular lapse which closed his life, and to which 
I shall in a moment allude, he would have continued to 
the end to impress and direct the Great Committee. 

V He has been called implacable in his hatred^ — here 
again, as in his vanity, a false impression is conveyed. 
He was bewildered by the opportunist, and still more by 
the man who was tenacious of ideals other than his own. 
He could not but believe the man who dealt with facts 
and who arranged a combination of forces to have about 
him something impure ; he could not but believe the 
man who was attached by affection to this or that incon- 
sistency to have about him some aberration of morals. 
That practical temper and those inconsistencies of affec- 
tion which are the general tone of all mankind, he, on 
the contrary, imagined to be peculiar to some few evil 
and exceptional men, and these he was for removing 
as abhorrent to the perfect State and corrupting to it. 
" You say that self-government is of right, and yet you 
will not immediately grant the suffrage to all ? You are 
insincere, a liar, a deceiver of the people." " You say 
you believe in God, and yet you oppose the execution of 
this atheist ? You are corrupt and perhaps bribed. If 
God be really God, this infinite God and his Majesty 
must certainly be defended. But perhaps you do not 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 33 

believe in Him — then you also must go the way of the 
man you are defending." " You say the people are 
sovereign, and yet you are seen in the house of men 
who approved of the middle class militia firing on the 
crowd ? Then you are a traitor." Wherever men of the 
usual sort perceive but one of the million inconsistencies 
of life — inconsistencies that vary infinitely in degree, and 
that must be of a rare sort to be counted as crimes 
or aberrations — Robespierre saw but glaring antitheses ; 
something unjust, untrue, and very vile. 

While theory thus led him to violent animosities, it 
forbade him sincere affections. This, which is the widest 
gap in the texture of his mind and the principal symp- 
tom of his unnatural abstraction, explains a great part of 
his adventures. There can be no better corrector of in- 
tellectual extravagance than the personal love of friends, 
for this gives experience of what men are, educates the 
mind to complexity, makes room for healthy doubt, puts 
stuff into the tenuous framework of the mind, and pre- 
vents the mere energy of thought from eating inward. 
Many loved him. One man, Lebas, died simply for his 
sake. Another, St. Just, though losing a little of his 
illusion at the end, for many years made a messiah of 
Robespierre. He himself cannot be said to have loved 
with consistent passion a single individual. He was not 
without kindliness, he reciprocated adoration with courtesy 
and goodwill, but his soul lacked whatever organ can 
attach us to our fellows. Nor had he, as I think, in 
spite of his sensitive hours, his musings at sunset, and 
his frequent seclusions, those permanent emotions which 
are correlative to human affections. For all his lonely 
walks and reveries, he took, as I should imagine, but 
slight pleasure in colours, and was divorced from Nature 
— from the movement of life, and from the troubling 
inspiration of distances and wide horizons. 

Again, to be so absolutely sure of so many things 

c 



34 ROBESPIERRE 

because one has them all connected in a perfect system 
must of necessity breed an insane intolerance, and, per- 
haps, persecution. I do not mean an intolerance of plain 
outrage or a persecution of men that deny the first prin- 
ciples of political morality ; I mean an interference with 
the minutest actions and with matter remote from the 
prime springs of opinion. It is a grave historical error 
to confuse Robespierre with the Terror — indeed, it is 
an error no longer committed save by historians whose 
ignorance of the French language and of recent research 
preserves them in a traditional net ; but his special use of 
the Terror, the few instances in which he leant personally 
upon its awful authority, were of the very kind that 
men can least patiently bear ; they dealt with domestic 
matters, with chance phrases, with private morals. He^^ 
has been called a Puritan ;he_WM_ partly ariinqiiiidtor. 
His idea that he was the servant and agent of pure 
right made him in this and in that a tyrant, just where 
tyranny is most monstrous. To one man or another, for 
moments only, a tyrant ; but a tyrant just in those little 
things wherein tyranny is most intolerable. 

It would be very false to find in all this an absence 
of the great virtues ; their balance and general presence 
it was that he lacked. Certainly he loved truth, making 
it indeed far too easy of attainment, and thinking it 
entirely achieved in that one formula of one depart- 
ment of inquiry which possessed him. Certainly, also, he 
loved Truth in action — Justice. Or rather he could 
not tolerate that his conception of Justice (which 
was of course a purely political conception) should 
suffer the least injury. But, though he was too ab- 
sorbed for Pride, he was empty of positive Humility 
altogether ; and Charity (the appreciation of living things, 
and the salt and good moderator of life) was never granted 
to him at all. When men are judged by the right they 
could and meant to do — ^which is the final manner — he 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 2S 

will be judged with some leniency: for the thing in 
which he was wrapped up was an idea of fulfilling justice. 
It was so partial as to warp and destroy the mind ; its 
insufficiency and misapplication offends the sense and 
angers a wider experience, yet it was — for him — an idea 
of fulfilling justice. That which condemned him at last 
among his contemporaries, which has somewhat falsified 
him in general literature, and will bring him no affection 
in accurate and detailed history, was, not that he did 
wrong, seeing well what right was, but that there was 
something misshapen in the outline of his mind ; that 
his one temptation of power was not excused by ability, 
and that the extravagance of often absurd and some- 
times monstrous conclusions was inharmonious to a 
character that burned with none of the interior and 
generative fires. 

To this main direction of his spirit one must add 
a little literary ambition which never indeed controlled 
him, but which, since he was industrious, clung to 
and rather belittled his whole career — for he was in- 
capable of great phrase. He had also a power of 
expression not wholly to be despised, connected with 
his certitude, always approaching and sometimes sur- 
passing a conventional eloquence. He was sufficiently 
conscious of his inability in matters of construction and 
lay apart from action — and though he was attentive, 
laborious, concerned at the close of his life with a 
hundred details of government, yet real action was never 
demanded of him. It is an error to praise his courage 
or condemn his cowardice. He was firm, but never gave 
his firmness an opportunity of exercise save in matters 
purely moral. He showed no terror in the face of grave 
physical dangers, and he was wholly indifferent to the 
opportunities of combative fame^— to all that side of his 
imperfect humanity nothing but negation applies. He 
would certainly have died— At may almost be said that 



36 ROBESPIERRE 

he did die— for his principles; had he been compelled 
to fight physically for them he would have fought — 
but very awkwardly. Finally, he was affected by his 
isolation of mind in this way, that, while of a type very 
willing to remain unknown, yet, once he became famous, 
he was prone to exaggerate his real self even in his own 
eyes. He tended under the high temptation of success to 
be convinced of his own sanctity, and under the pressure 
of fame he hardened rather than dissolved the shell that 
cut him off from men. 

Whoever has in him sharp differences from the normal 
or grave lacunae, these will appear under the attrition of 
time if the whole character be brought into play. The 
whole character of Robespierre would by no means have 
appeared in any ordinary career; but the Revolution 
brought into the most complete activity a mind so 
entirely political, and — not however until he had been 
subjected to a great strain of power — this flaw appeared 
in him, that in order to impress something of himself 
upon the world he gave up a little of these absolutes 
upon which alone his force depended and which were 
his talisman. It was with the advent of the extreme 
period of the Revolution that this lapse, long germinat- 
ing, became at last apparent. He had first felt, then 
chosen, power, but not till that date did he abandon his 
natural limits of negative definition and attempt to create 
something positive and distinct from the liberal Republic 
to which the general genius of France was tending. The 
experiment was like the thrusting of an obstacle into 
machinery of great power working at a prodigious speed : 
things split and cracked, the fabric of the new state 
rocked from extremes of violence to extreme reaction, 
and in a vast confusion which destroyed its author, the 
Revolution ended : Thermidor. 

There, is the person, the character and the principal 



PERSON AND CHARACTER 37 

political effect of Robespierre. To wliat is such a spirit 
fitted ? In times of peace to a consistent obscurity ; in 
times of armed change to be a sign or watchword, to be 
worshipped or followed as a name. 

This truth, that such unnatural consistency in the 
exposition of a new creed uplifts the cold expositor 
and makes of his name something other and far greater 
than himself, is the reading of Robespierre. It was 
hardly he that stood in the Jacobin mind of '91 ; it 
was not he himself at all that was returned first deputy 
of Paris in '92, least of all was it for the true Robes- 
pierre that the Commune rose. The centre of an office, 
an insignium, he lasted till he attempted to rule, and then 
the illusion fell in ashes. Here is perhaps the solution 
of the capital problem of the time, why this small 
exsanguine figure should have passed unscathed through 
such heats and, insistent, restrained, should have led such 
a column as the shouting march of the Reform. 

For what was the Revolution ? Whence proceeded 
the indomitable armies and the new songs ? The under- 
thing which we touch in the single lines of the poets 
and in certain phrases of music, nourished it from within. 
It lived by the guide of the soul, it was full of that flame 
which burns up once suddenly in the lives of men when 
the boy leaps into manhood. There ran through it the 
vigour by which the springs also come and whatever 
enters into youth from the world outside. There was 
a spirit in it which is the whole theme of Lucretius, the 
centre of being, the power to create. To have looked 
into the souls of the Convention (by which Robes- 
pierre first was raised and which at last he controlled), 
would have been to experience every shade of energy, of 
desire, and of irradiation, of colour, and of force. In that 
company he passed, a portent ; a pale exception that had 
been turned for a time to an idol, but that, in the 
coming back of the realities, contrasted and jarred. It 



38 ROBESPIERRE 

was tlie dull and early dawn of a July day, coming 
in by a shaded window, and slowly revealing things that 
ended him suddenly as a dream is ended. 

He stood, a pale exception, a man all conviction and 
emptiness, too passionless to change, too iterant to be an 
artist, too sincere and tenacious to enliven folly with 
dramatic art, or to save it by flashes of its relation to 
wisdom. When so many loved and hated men or 
visions, till their great souls turned them into soldiers, 
he knew nothing but his Truth and was untroubled. 

The hopeless oneness of structure that is for living 
things a negation of life, the single outlook and 
exiguous homogeneity of his mind, made him in the first 
troubling hopes of the Revolution a shaft or guide, in 
its dangers and betrayals an anchor, in its high, last, 
and vain attempt to outstrip our human boundaries, a 
symbol, and in its ebb of return to common living a 
tedium and a menace. For when men full of human 
complexity reposed at last in victory and had leisure 
to balance things again, he was seen to have neither 
instinctive human foreknowledge nor the sad human 
laughter, and there was no exile in his eyes. 



CHAPTER II 

THE DESCENT AND YOUTH OF ROBESPIERRE 

Robespierre was born, somewliat unduly/ at two o'clock 
of the morning of May the 6th, 1758, in his father's 
house at Arras. His ancestry, his father's position, his 
name, the very parish in which he was born determine 
for us with the greatest precision the conditions that 
should have impressed his whole career, for it is remark- 
able that in the case of this man, whose inner part stands 
like a riddle in modern history, the original conditions 
of life and its externals are certainly more distinctive and 
possibly better known than is the case with any of his 
contemporaries. His family, house, occupation, friends, 
all point to one special type so familiar to French society, 
that we should of right expect in him a character simple 
and consonant with its peculiar tradition. We find, upon 
the contrary, nothing but an empty frame ; we are given 
the limits of his action and the boundaries of his experi- 
ence; but what he became, subject though he was to 
those limits and boundaries, was something dissonant. 

Nevertheless it is of primary importance to know 
these conditions of his birth, because it is only in them 
that we can establish the arena wherein his mind took 
action ; and since they all centre round the long descent 
through which he could trace his name, it is in the story 
of his family that I would begin to show the atmosphere 
by which he was surrounded. 

A tradition of some value gives an Irish origin to 

1 His father and mother were married in January. He was born in 
May. 

39 



^ 



40 ROBESPIERRE 

the Robespierres, and ascribes their immigration into 
Picardy^ to the Catholic persecution in England at the 
close of the sixteenth century. In support of this tra- 
dition, widely spread as it is in his own district, no 
documentary evidence has appeared; but very shortly 
after the supposed date of this settlement — namely, in 
the first years of the seventeenth century — they were 
established in Carvin, a little place on the high road as 
you come from Lille, about twelve miles before Arras. 
There, throughout the century, they are the public 
notaries, the town-clerks, the ojBficials of the little borough ; 
but it must not be imagined that we have here to deal 
with that middle legal class which was the fibre of the 
two hundred years of Bourbon administration and from 
which so much of the Revolution proceeded. 

We have not to do with the Dantons, the Jean Bon, 
and the rest in whom a sound professional training linked 
to an ignorance of the territorial world made some ob- 
server (whose name I forget, but whose gibe is often 
quoted) compare the parliaments of the great reform to 
a meeting of country attorneys. The Robespierres were 
gentlemen by a thousand tests, and it is of the first 
importance to any student of the Revolution that he 
should appreciate the exact quality of the class to which 
such a principal figure belonged. It is necessary to see 

1 It is remarkable that while his Parisian biographers make such 
ludicrous guesses as "Roberts-Peter" for the English original of the 
name, the local tradition will have it "Robertspeare," a much more likely 
combination. The tradition, unsupported though it be by any document, 
has in its favour the fact that this corner of France was a favourite 
refuge for the Catholics under Elizabeth, and provided a base for the 
propaganda of the counter-Reformation. It is also remarkable and 
hardly explicable on any other hypothesis than that of a foreign origin, 
that a family bearing arms and boasting the title of gentlemen and 
admitted to the privileges of that rank should be discovered securely 
settled and publicly known as early as the minority of Louis XIII., and 
yet should have left no traces of their presence under the Valois. The 
continued clerical protection afEorded to his family is not without its 
value in this connection. 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 41 

in Kobespierre not only the son of a certain ancestry two 
centuries old, but the son also of men jealous of a social 
privilege, carefully moulded by a family profession into the 
legal habit of thought, tending in spite of themselves 
to lose a little of their claims to rank, yet keeping its 
memory, associating always, though on a somewhat lower 
plane, with the few families and interests that governed 
the Artois. Poor, never indebted, locally prominent but 
devoid of public ambition, their position in Carvin for 
a hundred years points to the whole of such a set of con- 
ditions. They were protected as religious refugees of a 
certain rank were throughout the north-east ; that pro- 
tection (as one would expect) increased with the influence 
of Louis XIV. and the slow reaction in England against 
the Stuarts. In the critical year of 1688 Robert de 
Robespierre ^ was granted the lieutenancy of the county 
of £pinoy, and though that function was nothing grander 
in practice than the headship of a local bureaucracy and 
tax-collecting machine, yet its title had enough sound 
about it to make it the occasional perquisite of nobility ; 
and a family that while empty of land had kept to their 
" de " with pertinacity were partly rewarded, partly con- 
firmed by such an appointment. When Yves de Robes- 
pierre, eight years later, applied to the Heralds' College 
for his arms,^ it was but the reaffirmation of his right to 
bear a coat with whose traditional escutcheon he himself 
furnished the authorities. 

The close of the seventeenth century and the opening 
of the eighteenth marked a slight change in the fortunes 
of the family; it lost a little of its pride, it took on a 

^ He was the great-great-grandson of Maximilian, the last of the 
family to marry a noble (Rictrude de Bruille). 

* Yves was one of Robert's sons and the great-great-uncle of Maxi- 
milian. For the benefit of those who are interested in such things, 
I may mention that the arms were found by Hamel in d'Hauterive's 
"Armorial de la France" (i. 33, and p. 374), and are described as "Or, 
with a band sable ; charg^, demi vol, argent." 



42 ROBESPIERRE 

little of ambition. It entered into the first of a series 
of inferior but well-dowered alliances, and yet the son 
of this first bourgeois marriage was raised to the higher 
branch of the profession, and was removed from the 
local dignity of Carvin to the more useful if more com- 
petitive society of the capital of the province. It was 
Robert's son Martin that married the daughter of a 
well-to-do post-master with large stables in the town, 
and their son, Maximilian (the elder), that settled at 
Arras as a barrister in 1720. It was he who bought 
the house of the Rue des Rapporteurs, who established 
the relations of the family with the Abbey of St. Waast 
and with the Archbishopric, and who wove the social web 
upon which the family depended for over seventy years. 

The site and appearance of his house, the centre 
from which he built up the new foundation of the family, 
are typical of its character and future fortunes. 

The Revolution, if a close examination be made of its 
principal actors, will be found to proceed from a few 
special provincial centres, for France, unified and cen- 
tralised as she is, possesses beyond any other nation the 
energy that proceeds from the contrast and strong inter- 
action of the almost tribal divisions that make up the whole. 
In that, Gaul is still Gaul ; and I mention a few of those 
groups when I name the mountains of the higher Isere, 
the Delta of the Rhone, the great valley of the Gironde ; 
the mysticism and conviction of Brittany, the sense of 
Champagne, the hard idealism of the highlanders of the 
Cevennes, the broad content of Normandy. With each 
of these something separate — Vizille, the war song; 
Vergniaud, the early revolt of Rennes, Danton, Jean 
Bon, or the rebels' march of 1793 — is associated. But of 
these none form a more curious study than the group 
of provinces that hold the north-east — Flanders, Picardy 
and the Artois. Here is a spirit that should be of the 
borders, a place where the large heart of the midlands 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 43 

and vines miglit meet the steady vision of the Teuton 
and mix to make a population of solid mediocrity. 
There is nothing of the kind. If such a barrier mixture 
is found anywhere in France it is in the profound and 
wholesome valley where the woods are fed by the shallow 
Moselle. It is not in the north-east. There, on the 
contrary, this paradox appears; whatever is old. Patois 
in speech and still attached to local terms and measures 
is also luxuriant, almost wanton, in art and in the manner 
of living. Rich Flanders is in their blood, what they say 
is eloquent ; they are of that low country that brought 
forth Rubens on its far north - eastern, Desmoulins on 
its south-western edge. Their architecture is riotous in 
detail, verging on the fantastic in its general conception. 
They are a pasture-land in Europe ; high towers dominate 
them ; they paint the clouds and delight in woodwork and 
dark rooms. But all this has provoked and excited an 
opposite pole on the same soil. The French reoccupation, 
coinciding as it did with the first establishment of the 
Bourbon bureaucracy brought in a new class as frigid, 
regular and determined as the old was manifold and 
untrammelled. I will not deny that there was latent in 
the blood even of that class a potential enthusiasm, for 
these horizons will not let the soil rest, but as a body they 
were pushed by a kind of official reaction into a habit of 
order and somewhat pedantic accuracy in all affairs. 

All this contrast is set out in stone in the town of 
Arras. There you have the old inner city full of the 
quaint and the grotesque ; sprawling over it is the Abbey 
of St. Waast that a man might draw in a dream ; that 
inner town is grouped round the superb, rich belfry 
of the abbey ; it is marked at every corner by innumer- 
able stepped gables, and to the smallest ornaments on the 
door-posts it calls up the voluptuous magic of Flanders 
and the tilled fens. Outside this nucleus in which Spain 
and Austria sowed the Renaissance in so rich a soil, 



44 ROBESPIERRE 

runs like a ring the cold town of the classical philo- 
sophers, of the bureaucracy, of the encyclopsedia ; the 
formal provincial streets that reflect in some poor way 
the spirit which the grand sikle had imposed upon the 
capital. By an accident that it seems fantastic to treat 
symbolically and that yet may be an effect of the elder 
Maximilian's judgment and partly a cause of his grand- 
son's career, the house in the Rue des Rapporteurs was 
situated just within the official French quarter, yet in 
easy touch with the Flemish centre in which the bishop, 
the great abbey and the town life of the provincial 
nobility exercised their power. 

The house ^ itself is small, square, unornamented, 
bourgeois, white. All built for utility, standing at a 
corner of two streets, immediate to the Place du Theatre, 
close therefore at once to the posting houses of the Paris 
road and to the municipal offices, it has continued to 
fulfil even since the end of the Robespierrean connection 
some such purpose as that for which the old barrister 
designed it, being always tenanted by men of good 
position in the town though dependent upon its commerce 
or administration. It is wonderfully dull. There is no 
garden, no court, no sign of carving or careful panels ; 
and its whole atmosphere is that of the unmomentous 
past lying behind the family ; a tradition of exactitude 
and probity mixed with a little pride of name. For 
all this dulness and lack of colour something of their 
claims and legends survived. When Charles Edward, 

^ The Place du Theatre is right on the road from the station. The 
Rue de Rapporteurs runs into the little square on its northern side, and 
the house of the Robespierres is the long white house on the left of the 
first corner. It must be remembered, by the way, that all my description 
of this as a long-inhabited freehold of the family's is debatable matter. 
There is proof in Arras that the Robespierres possessed other houses 
at various times, but I do not think it so certain that they lived in them 
or that one need necessarily doubt the universal tradition, including 
that of the family itself, that the White House was a family freehold 
of long standing. 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 45 

having lost everything in the '45, took to mysticism, he 
founded, among others, a lodge of the Rosicrucians at 
Arras in 1757 and gave the headship of it to the son of 
the barrister in the Rue des Rapporteurs, the uncle of 
the Revolutionary.^ That Catholic, quasi-noble and 
emigrant tradition, continued also in the growing in- 
timacy between the family and the cathedral, but strong 
as the sentiment was it could not survive the effect 
of many years in which hard work had brought no 
fortune. The "de" which the ancestors had clung to 
so firmly became merged in the name,^ and another of 
those unfortunate marriages which had already marked 
the decline of their pretensions came in this same year 
of 1757 to lower them further. 

It was a love match. Maximilian-Bartholomew, the 
old barrister's son, a man of immediate impulse, fell into 
a violent and lifelong passion for the daughter of a 
brewer in the suburb of Rouxville, by name Carrault ; 
his father strongly opposed the union. An intrigue 
hastened the marriage; by that, in all probability, the 
father's objection was overridden, and the race was 
continued on the insufficient dowry and the lower blood 
of this alliance.^ 

It is probable that Robespierre's birth (he was the 
eldest of four children of the marriage) broke down part 
of the old man's prejudice. At least he stood godfather 

^ In the archives at Arras the first proceedings of this lodge are signed 
"Ch. Stuwart" and "Deberkley " 1 It is interesting to those who follow 
the crop of secret societies which developed in the last century and their 
connection with freemasonry to know that the present "Constancy" 
Lodge at Arras claims, and can, I believe, establish a direct descent from 
Charles Edward's whimsical foundation. 

^ Robespierre's father and grandfather both sign "Derobespierre." 
He himself, successful and rising to public oflfice in the capital, re- 
assumed the separate particle, and did not finally drop it till as late as 
June 1790. 

' That the marriage rather impoverished than helped the Robespierres 
is proved by the son's inability to set up a house of his own and by the 
lack of resources at the father's death. 



46 ROBESPIERRE 

at tlie Churcli of tlie Madeleine when Lenglart baptized 
the child some few hours after its birth ; and the names 
given to him were Maximilian-Mary-Isidore.^ 

Coming from such a family, Kobespierre should have 
left some sequence of administration to influence through 
his posterity, or his collateral descendants, the new era 
at whose creation he assisted, and of which he falsely 
imagined himself an author. It was the honourable fate 
of many of his contemporaries to hand down a tradition 
with their name and to claim over a society that is 
tenacious of ancestry and descent the special precedence 
due to their own labours and eminence, and to their 
legacy of public talent. Danton, had he returned to 
the France of which he had been the defender, could 
have seen his nephew professing in the University 
whose new vigour had arisen under the hand of the 
Convention ; and though by an accident of celibacy 
his own son's name was not preserved, yet his family 
is still represented in the administration of his native 
town, and continues to exercise upon a higher plane 
the functions in which his own father had served Arcis. 
Cambon, a principal architect of the constrictive Revo- 
lution, sees in his descendants an example of the same 
fortune, profitable alike to his family and to the state. 
The sound bourgeois stock from which he, the municipal 
officer, the merchant, and the financier, drew was the most 
vital in France, and it was on such a strip that the new 
administrative class was grafted. Of this characteristic 
in the Revolutionary tradition Carnot again gives a yet 
more conspicuous example. Himself of the legal ancestry 
that played so great a part in the reform, a mind in 
which the engineer and the soldier combined to design 
and to fortify liberty, his great legend was fruitful beyond 

^ Who was his godmother? All we know of it is the name "Marie 
Antoinette " written right across the register in a large, round and some- 
what illiterate hand ; probably that of a child. 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 47 

that of any contemporary; tlie exile and tlie death in 
poverty to which the meanness of the foreign garrison 
drove him had no evil effect upon the chances of his 
family, and did little even to promote its success. By 
a kind of natural inheritance his son took his place 
in '48, and continued till his death to exercise in the 
senate an influence as firm and wide as it was ill-adver- 
tised. A Carnot of the third generation occupied, with 
honour and devotion, the chief magistracy, and was killed 
in the midst of its duties ; those of the fourth are rising 
to a continued eminence in the service of the Republic, 
a mixture still of the soldier with the man of letters 
and of science, and still proving the vigour of their 
Burgundian blood. The Cavaignacs, son and grandson 
of a less famous Convention nel, yet take their place upon 
the long Republican tradition, and if their stoicism, touch- 
ing as it does the boundary of the puritanical, is too 
high for their contemporaries, it yet continues to earn for 
their present as it will for their future representative the 
universal respect of the nation. 

Robespierre should, then, have left some kind of 
family thread for history to pick up, if his fortunes had 
proved in any way parallel to those of his colleagues. 
They had been regicides as he had ; they were without 
exception members of the band that was at once the 
advanced guard and the general staff of the Revolution ; 
and if that prime factor in the permanence of political 
influence be considered — I mean the solid origins of 
ancestry combined with a long tenure of local govern- 
ment — his claims to such a posterity were, as the last 
pages have shown, superior to those of the men I have 
cited. But it is the note of Robespierre's life and of the 
subsequent chances of his house that his position and 
his legend were as unique and exceptional as his charac- 
ter. Whether it was the horror that the eddies and the 
backwash of opinion threw up upon his name, or more 



48 ROBESPIERRE 

probably an instinctive recognition of how unpolitical 
were bis qualities, the generations that succeeded bim 
took no heed of bis collateral descendants, a name tbat 
might have at least fascinated by terror, and that even 
proved attractive to the extremists of 1848 was allowed 
to fall into obscurity. The very rank of which the 
French of that class are so tenacious was let drop with- 
out an effort, and in these last years that family has, so 
far as I can trace it, disappeared through the death of 
most inconsiderable representatives/ 

Charlotte, indeed, the elder of his two sisters, lived on 
into the reign of Louis Philippe,^ dependent upon a small 
pension that Bonaparte had granted, and that the routine 
of a government department continued, though somewhat 
diminished, throughout the changes of the restoration 
and those of the monarchy of July. A silent and 
dignified figure, she maintained to the close of her long 
life a reserve that was a little marked by the bitterness 
which had warped her character in youth. Here and 
there at rare intervals her name startled the ear of 
some chance visitor who might enter the poor flat of 
her friend and protectress, and there are yet living, or 
but lately dead, several men who have told how, as boys, 
they turned their heads suddenly at the introduction to 
a Kobespierre.^ This last representative of the House 

^ The last near collateral descendant of Kobespierre's — a great-great 
nephew — was run over by a train near Carvin two years ago. He was a 
local chemist, and with him ended the family. But there still lives in 
Grenelle, or did recently, in the Kue de la F^d^ration, a great-grandson of 
Robespierre's first cousin, also born near Carvin. This gentleman who, 
oddly enough, has preserved the " de " attaching to the family, is a coal 
merchant, and has or had a son in the 8th Hussars. This is, I think, the 
only stock of the name even remotely connected with the Revolutionary. 

2 It is in the Archives of the twelfth Paris Arrondissement that she 
died at four in the morning of August 4th, 1834, at the age of seventy-four 
years, at No. 3 Rue de la Fontaine. 

^ The late M. Jules Simon mentioned in his memoirs, published in The 
Temps newspaper, a visit paid by him to Mademoiselle Robespierre in 1831, 
three years before her death. He went with his tutor, Lebas, of whom there 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 49 

at Arras did not die without leaving for history the most 
valuable materials. Her notes upon her brother's youth, 
collected and amplified (not without rhetoric and ready- 
made phrases) by Laperronaye,^ yet form the best original 
we possess on which to found our idea of the sombre 
adolescence and more contented early manhood which 
preceded his last five Revolutionary years. 

When Maximilian was but seven years old, and before 
the youngest child, Augustin, could speak, the first blow 
of the many that were to drive his character inward fell 
upon him. His mother died, and his father, a man 
whose extreme sensibility had half unfitted him for 
assiduity and entirely for success, saw slip from him in 
a moment the affection for whose sake he had mis- 
shaped his career and checked the fortunes of his family. 
The shock did but hasten the process that his whole 
life had discovered. He could work no more. His 
practice left him, and by an impulse that is not un- 
common to such men tortured by memories, he broke 
from the ruins of his duty and the associations with 
which his house was surrounded, to wander aimlessly 
beyond the frontiers, in Germany and in England, living 
at random on chance lessons and on such small sums as 
his relations could send him. He left his children to 
the more sober guardianship of their mother's family. 
His despair killed him ; and the news of his death, 
reaching Arras when Maximilian had barely entered his 
tenth year, produced a yet more profound impression 
upon the boy than his mother's loss of less than three 

is some mention in this book. I also have it on the authority of M. Aude- 
brand that M. Joigneux, the senator for the C6te d'Or, who died five years 
ago, met her several times in 1830, and I have based part of my descrip- 
tion on his notes. 

^ I have no space in a footnote to prove the genuineness of these 
memoirs upon which I have not hesitated to base my appreciation of 
Robespierre's boyhood, but a long note at the end of the book develops 
the argument in their favour. They have been thought false upon curiously 
little evidence. 

D 



so ROBESPIERRE 

years before. In the situation where he had now fallen 
many things combined to stamp permanently upon his 
habit of thought the hard directness which continued to 
distinguish it. His misfortunes had come just at the 
age when a precocious imagination may be most vividly 
affected. They were not so ample as to force him into 
quick and active observation. His poor father had left 
untouched the little patrimony at Arras; the youth 
that lay before him would necessarily be one of some 
humiliation and of continued labour, but of an assured 
if moderate success. To many the effect of such an 
introduction to life would be to breed a determination 
for material advancement, and a mere end in the recovery 
of wealth; but there ran round Robespierre's mind a 
covering of idealism which, if thin, was crystalline. It 
constrained his energies to particular channels, and gave 
misfortune the power not only to spur, but also and 
chiefly to mould and bend the mind. Thus early he 
began to consider his own self and his rights, and his 
isolation. He brooded and lost his boyhood. The eldest 
of that little family of orphans, perceiving already that 
the protection of his mother's people, for all their dignity 
and kindness, was something a little lowering to the 
name he had inherited from his grandfather, he took on 
responsibility and a habit of disappointed but persistent 
thought. It made him at last a scholar, then a lawyer, 
but it forbade him to forget or take life well. 

There was at that time in Arras a bishop of the 
name of De Conzie, a great noble of course, as every 
bishop was before the Revolution/ but full of judgment 
and of heart, wise and willing to examine. An applica- 
tion was made to him to use his influence for the boy, 
and he very readily assented. Two generations of inti- 
macy and good relations between the Robespierres and 

1 Of the 154 bishops that France enjojed before the Revolution, bub 
three were of the rank of the apostles j all the rest were territorials. 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 51 

tlie see of Arras, and the memory of official connections 
throughout the province, made it easy to find the help 
that was needed. The great abbey of St. Waast, which 
was lord of a third of the town, and a coequal power 
with the king and the bishop in its government, pro- 
cured him a scholarship in the University of Paris. I 
need not detail here the secular conservatism by which 
founders still disposed of the scholarships in those 
colleges, nor detail the story of the college of Arras.^ 
It is enough for my purpose to mention that this little 
foundation had been merged into the great institution of 
Louis le Grand, which still keeps its place after the vast 
reconstruction of this hundred years. It was to those 
high walls and narrow courts that he passed in his 
twelfth year, and it was the Jesuits that trained for 
twelve years, as he passed into a pale manhood, the 
exact deductions of his mind. 

So far his childhood at Arras had had little good 
and had languished. His sisters, placed by a similar 
care in an excellent convent (perhaps a trifle above their 
station), saw him from time to time, playing alone and 
especially devoted to his birds, his pet pigeons. Such 
lessons as he did showed his aptitude and precocity, and 
he went up to Paris expected to do well enough in his 
studies, with a character from his former masters of a 
rather melancholy taciturnity. But he was gentle. The 
entry into Paris, which is always a new pain to the French 
(for their hearts have roots at home) was perhaps a 
third grief to the child. He had lost both father and 
mother, now his home, and for two years he saw no more 
of his birds or his sisters. But a cousin, a Canon of 
Notre Dame, a De la Roche, a petty noble, in rank and 
sort what he was, often leoeived him and left a tradition 
of gratitude until his death. In Paris at last he found 

^ I have a short note on it upon page 388 of my essay on "Paris" 
(published by Mr. Edward Arnold). 



52 ROBESPIERRE 

the sustenance for which his mind was fitted ; he attained 
scholarship, or rather a very ready familiarity with his 
authors, a very wide field of classical reading, and a 
special exactitude in his knowledge of the texts and of 
the history of the old civilisation. It is customary, and 
on the whole just, to decry the portentous number of 
antique allusions that flood the Revolution, and that are 
nowhere more thickly sown than in Robespierre's own 
speeches, but they are proof at least in their volume and 
accuracy of the training through which he passed, and 
illustrate the academic success upon which was founded 
his future eminence. 

His delicate, if still morbid and narrowly furnished 
mind, his refined if restrained and unboyish manner, left 
him free to earn the esteem of his superiors and perhaps 
the neglect of his equals, saving that Camille Desmoulins, 
a mad-cap from Guise, witty, ebullient, pleasing in his 
health and vivacity, a genial stammerer, three years his 
junior, became his fast friend, and had for him, it seems, 
a kind of hero-worship, such as later he inspired for a 
time in the high youth of St. Just. But of the two it 
was Robespierre (though later he left so inferior a mark 
upon the letters of his country) that greatly excelled in 
his studies. 

From his sixteenth year he was the head of his 
school in composition, latinity, and a judgment of his 
classics, and saving that he had not yet approached 
philosophy, was already regarded as the first scholar of 
the foundation. In his seventeenth, the honours he had 
acquired received a reward which is of curious interest 
to the student of the Revolution. 

Louis XVI., a young king returning from his corona- 
tion at Rheims, made a progress from Notre Dame up 
to St. Genevieve on the hill of the university, and took 
for his station on the way the great college that led the 
Latin quarter. He made a kind of state entry, and a boy 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 53 

had to be deputed to read him a Latin speech. Robes- 
pierre was very naturally chosen. The speech, such as 
it should be for such an occasion, revised moreover by 
the obsequious care of an efficient master, contained 
nothing of any moment, and is, I believe, destroyed 
The contrast, however, of this unknown child nervously 
reciting his panegyric in the magnificent but fatigued 
presence of what held all France, should stand perma- 
nently in the history of the time ; because, taking them 
each simply as they were, brute accident was to set 
them against each other; a rare and momentary light 
was to put these two in view for ever ; the fame of each 
vastly exceeding his natural obscurity; the one by the 
unhappy inheritance of a crown, the other by the pure 
chance of violent change were to be heard of after and 
remembered. 

Nothing remains of his further studies. His scholar- 
ship presupposed a course of law ; he bent himself to 
it for the three years that followed his degree. When 
he was twenty- two, in 1781, his connection with the 
college ended. He had earned its gratitude and patron- 
age ; his younger brother, Augustin, a boy of insignificant 
abilities, was permitted to succeed to the endowment, 
and he himself was voted a sum of ;^2 5 by way of 
a prize that was sometimes granted to those who had 
done best on the foundation. He wisely returned to 
Arras, where tradition, good-will, and some patronage 
awaited him, and where he had been familiar in the 
summer vacations since the death of his host and cousin 
in Paris. He took up an even life in the family house, 
harboured his sister, was easily enabled by his every 
limitation and virtue to adopt a laborious daily habit. 
There lay like a restricted, clear, monotonous road before 
him a career that fitted his persistent character. Its 
goal was the old legal position and social prestige that 
his family had earned, and of which he now took up 



54 ROBESPIERRE 

successfully the tradition his father had imperilled. It 
was able to satisfy that craving for recognition which 
was no determining character of his, but certainly an 
enduring foible. He was in reach of and could enjoy 
the station he demanded ; it suited him to the full 
to admit the conventional superiority of some, and to 
receive the equally conventional solicitations of many more 
in his native town. The intense political convictions 
which underlay his mind would at the worst have seemed 
but an amiable exaggeration of words, at the best (and 
most probably) would have remained unheeded ; for he 
was a man that found no necessity for their active 
realisation in the existence about him. His ambition 
was but to be the respected and successful lawyer of the 
Artois. He more than fulfilled it. 

I have said little of the happy changes that his 
temper suffered by this transition from a morbid boy- 
hood to academic success and local distinction: they 
must be imagined from what I have barely detailed 
of his adolescence. But that boyhood must be re- 
membered, because men in great crises — sometimes by 
the mere waste of years — are found ever returning to 
the springs of their childhood ; and so at the end to him, 
who had to pass through such a furnace to such a 
death, there returned the self-pity, the tenacious assertion 
of his rights, sufferings, and convictions, which certainly 
early misfortunes had branded into his mind. For the 
moment this destiny was peaceably obscured. He lapsed 
in his twenty-third year into the polite discussion that 
passed for the intellectual life, and into the minute 
graces that were the true interests of his rank and place 
and time. The atmosphere was native, and he continued 
increasingly to enjoy what was best in the Artois. It was 
not unwise to find enough in the good life of his town ; 
it entered into him very fully, and when all such 
clothings were forgotten he maintained by a kind of 



DESCENT AND YOUTH S5 

instinct up to the scaffold the little methods that were 
inherited from these eight years. 

The life into which he entered had for its foundation 
that kind of practice at the bar of his province which, in 
its weight and yearly increase, is the mark of a prosperous 
future in the courts; it had literary occupation for its 
permanent satisfaction, and for its flower the conversa- 
tion and manners of a sound society. That would be a 
very false judgment which would find nothing but the 
mean or the ridiculous in the narrow sphere wherein his 
professional industry triumphed, and whose careful pro- 
vincial urbanity at once charmed, flattered, and trained 
him. It is true that centralisation had already reached 
its worst effects in the social spirit of France, and espe- 
cially that the drain upon the economic resources of the 
country towns had struck them with lethargy. The tran- 
sition from that state to the activity and local patriotism 
which distinguishes the modern municipalities of the 
country could only be forced by the Revolution : to the 
court and to Paris, Arras, or Guise, or Caen were little 
stagnant marshes. But there were features in the life of 
such towns w"hich, while inferior in value to the political 
qualities they have since developed, yet redeemed their 
influence and made them specially fitted to be the train- 
ing ground of the revolutionaries. Corruption and decay 
had but enhanced the position of the privileged classes 
within them ; the guarantees surrounding leisure pro- 
tected the growth of that conviction in abstract verities 
without whose presence reform is meaningless/ Philo- 
sophy of one school became a religion in these distant 
places, and they could furnish in a small way the spirit 
of academies. Had the change, which was a mechanical 

^ Allusions to the "Eights of Man," "Natural Law," &c., are five 
times more numerous in the Cahiers of the priests and nobles than in 
those of the Commons, and are practically absent in the agricultural 
petitions. 



S6 ROBESPIERRE 

necessity for the close of tlie eighteentli century, sprung 
from centres less vain and somnolent, France misflit have 
fallen into a confused tangle of immediate and merely 
practical remedies ; she would never have founded those 
general principles which can be applied to every trans- 
formation under which political or economic injustice 
may hide itself. Democracy, being creedless, could not 
have survived ; for, in the things of the mind, a creed is 
the condition of endurance. 

Moreover a great charm lay in the stiff decencies 
of their ritual. This charm you may yet recover in the 
avenues where discussion lingers under the elms of the 
Mall, or in the moats upon autumn evenings when you 
see waters covered with still leaves. The rivers of the 
French, which are slow streams full of memories, slip 
under the old walls of their cities and carry on con- 
tinually a light draught of the past. The spirit that 
haunts them was once a breath for living men; it 
tempted but it partially excused the universal desire for 
the formal and emotional expression of ideals ; and this 
desire which is the spring of literary mediocrity sur- 
rounded and inspired the youth of Robespierre ; it 
furnished him with companions of his kind, led on and 
permitted his ceaseless and valueless exercise in composi- 
tion ; all that circle of " de's," wigs, coloured coats and 
swords, as it were, compelled a man to write. 

This gentle literary tide set at Arras through the 
channel of a local academy, formed upon a model 
common to many provmcial capitals. This self-con- 
stituted society, half an exclusive club, half a solemn 
imitation of the famous body in Paris, had been formed 
in 1738 — it has passed through the vicissitudes of six 
generations. In the last century it naturally took on 
every feature of the dignified but failing tradition in 
which the class that formed it moved. More than half 
noble, decent and solid in matter, a trifle pompous in 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 57 

ceremony, boasting titles a little antiquated for the time, 
an election to it was yet a good mark of a man's position 
in his town, and it is worthy of notice that Robespierre 
filled his place in it as the successor of a canon of the 
cathedral. It was two years after his return to Arras 
that this honour, or rather status, was given him. Two 
years more and he was secretary to the society under 
the quaint style of " chancellor " — it was in this capacity 
that he received Carnot, then in garrison with the 
Engineers at Arras. He passed from that little office 
to the presidency of the body, and had the task of 
welcoming into it the daughter of Keralio, whose name, 
upon no evidence whatever,^ has been linked with his 
in a kind of drama. He had become, though one of 
the youngest, yet one of the most industrious and 
perhaps of the most prominent members of this somewhat 
faded community, when the great doors opened on his 
thirtieth year and let in the furnace-light wherein the 
very memory of all this disappeared. 

His connection with that provincial body was 
a small part even of the small life which pre- 
ceded his public fame. Nevertheless it is in that 
framework that one can best judge a character in 
him that proved enduring — I mean his industry, 
and secondary success in letters. It was as Member of 
the Academy of Arras that he exercised rather than 
acquired the persistent habit of writing which bound 
itself into all his actions, forbade the growth in him 
of rapid decision or of sudden appeal, and perhaps con- 
tributed at last not a little to his fall. To nourish this 

^ Mademoiselle de Keralio, the daughter of a little known historian, 
herself aspired to letters. She wrote a "Life of Elizabeth of England" 
and drew up a plan for the universal history of the whole world from 
the earliest times to the present day. She later married Robert at the 
outset of the Revolution, entered Paris, edited with her husband the 
Mercure National, and was one of the principal advocates of Robes- 
pierre in the earlier Revolution. 



58 ROBESPIERRE 

habit lie required nothing so weighty as fame, but at 
least a constant public mention, nor was he content 
unless his every expression was moulded by a literary 
standard. And this is somewhat of a contradiction in 
him and somewhat of a stumbling-block to his biographers; 
for his prodigious effect upon one generation of men 
depended upon an illusion or an appreciation very 
remote from the considerations of style. It was partly 
as an even orator, partly as a judge of assemblies, but 
mainly as one principle incarnate that he was able to 
arrest the attachment of men, yet in his own wishes, 
without a doubt, the wish to be remembered for a certain 
facility and polish of writing stood continually. 

It is well neither to exaggerate the mediocrity of his 
compositions at this period nor his own ambitions with 
regard to them. They exhibit in their style the special 
politics which later, whether he were under the most 
grievous strain or the opportunities of the widest action, 
he was incapable of changing. They procured him 
some jBattery. He gained an equal mention, and 
divided the first prize, with Lucretelle when the 
Academy of Metz offered a prize for the best essay on 
that abuse of the criminal law whereby the families of 
the condemned were struck with legal infamy. It was 
just such a subject, dealing with traditions of whose 
origins he had never heard, with anachronisms whose 
gradual development seemed to him merely monstrous, 
as was best suited to his even and ritual pen, and his 
treatment of it was sure to match the simple and definite 
sociology of the time. The thirty-odd pages of square, 
blue sermon-paper that remain as the proof of his labour 
have in them nothing which is not exactly consonant 
with his method. They contain the common condemna- 
tion of all that hung in a deadweight, undefended, about 
the progress of the old regime — the usual praise of, and 
appeal to, the young king, whom in France all then 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 59 

looked forward to as the introducer of a new time ; the 
Latin quotations, the peroration and the restrained and 
lifeless rhetoric of what has well been called the " good 
manners " of prose. The manuscript contains, moreover, 
curious signs of a habit that increased with his years, 
and that is typical of the conscious mind which directed 
his literary effort, for it is full of erasures and second 
thoughts. There remains nothing from his pen, hardly 
so much as a warrant or a hurried note, in which this 
feature does not recur ; it is in keeping with his small, 
slow, cramped, and hesitating hand ; ^ nor does the second 
(or third) phrase he may substitute ever express a second 
or third form of thought, it is ever the hesitation of 
style, or even the rewriting of the same thing after an 
interval of doubt.^ 

This success added a little to his local renown. It 
tempted him, in 1785, to a second competition, in which 
he failed — that of the Academy of Amiens — for an eulogy 
on the poet Gresset. The work is insignificant, and con- 
tains but one phrase to arrest the reader, the very typical 
sentence : " Gresset, you were a great poet, but you were 
more — you were a honest man. And as I praise your 
work, I shall not be compelled to turn my eyes away 
from your life." To any remonstrance that such plati- 
tudes verged upon the appalling, Robespierre would have 
replied that they dealt with a sublime truth, and he would 
have remained untouched; he was to find an audience 
for them and to preach them like a religion when exalta- 

1 The hand might be of any period. It is clear, not very sloping, but 
very small and irregular. He has one remarkable trick that the cynical 
might misinterpret : he never puts in a capital letter even after a full 
stop, save for the first person. 

2 There are several interesting examples of this nervous habit. In the 
warrant of the arrest of Theresa Cabarrus he signs his name, scratches it 
out, and signs it again. In his last speech he has three or four phrases 
(notably the threatening passage vphere he was interrupted) which are 
deleted and then rewritten in the same form. 



6o ROBESPIERRE 

tion tad burnt up the saving balance of humour, and 
■when the corrupt class, whose cynicism restrains such 
tediums, was destroyed. 

Yet the praise of an eighteenth-century minor poet, 
of a man whom Greuze might have illustrated, and who, 
I think, moves exactly in the furniture of the time, 
should have suited Robespierre; for this anomaly is 
to be remarked in him, that of his insufficient and dull 
exercises in writing, by far the least dull and the least 
insufficient are to be found in themes that demand a 
little grace,^ and this accident, which is remarkable in 
several letters, appears especially in his verse. 

There was at Arras, side by side with and far less 
stable than the Academy of which I have spoken, a little 
trifling society, which seemed, as it were, the Academy 
at play. They called themselves " Rosati," met yearly 
in the spring beside the melancholy Scarpe outside the 
walls, drank wine, wore roses, and delighted each other 
with passable or valueless songs. To this society, a 
product of the passion for cabals and passwords which 
possessed the eighteenth century, all, or nearly all, the 
members of the Academy would come; here Carnot, 
Marescot, and Fosseux, the elderly clerics of the Chapter 
— all the small, straight world of the town — read rhymes 
which have been properly forgotten. Among these, those 
of Robespierre, possessed of little talent, and often pass- 
ing the boundary of the absurd, yet did occasionally 
redeem themselves by a touch of grace, or even — what 
will seem surprising — a sustained irony. The little 
madrigal to Ophelia^ is quoted with its ending 
couplet : — ■ 



^ There is, of course, the example of a letter written to a lady who 
wished to paint his portrait. Hamel traces the MSS. of this only as far 
as 1862. It was then bought into a private English collection, and is now 
in the British Museum. 

2 Of whom tradition says that she was English, 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 61 

" To be the more beloved of all 
By doubting if beloved you are." 

The "Mouchoir du Predicateur" is what all the 
former readers of Voltaire were writing. Neither very- 
witty, nor by any means original in style, it is yet on a 
level with the many easy little satires of these twenty 
years. 

In all this mass of continual composition no energy 
is to be discovered, still less any bitterness, complaint, or 
judgment. His life had entered a quiet phase, his needs 
were satisfied ; his local repute, increasing as he went, left 
him contented. The grappling conviction that underlay 
his method of thought met no obstacle, and was called 
to no exercise. If I have insisted thus far upon the 
industrious facility with which his ordered leisure turned 
to authorship, it is to introduce the permanent literary 
form in which he cast himself, which coloured all his 
later action, and which helped to make him, when the 
elections of the great year fell upon Arras, one of the 
few expositors of that forgotten town. Until that oppor- 
tunity, however, during the eight years of his residence 
and practice, his verse and prose were but a sort of 
embroidery upon the serious work which established his 
name among his fellow-citizens and gave him the social 
basis from which he naturally obtained the ear of his 
province, on which he appealed in his election address, 
and in consonance with which he was returned a deputy 
to the States-General. That work was legal. 

This tangible advantage, which suited his character 
to a nicety and explains his successful introduction to 
politics, was connected with the importance necessarily 
attached in France to local courts. There is in France 
no circuit of assize. A man pleads before the small fixed 
tribunals of the cantons or before the higher courts of the 
towns, and even an appeal need not appear at the capital, 
save under the rarest conditions. It is true that one great 



62 ROBESPIERRE 

division of legal work could only be done in Paris, even 
under the old regime. The fact that Paris monopolised 
Chancery and what we should call Parliamentary work drew 
many young barristers thither ; but the bulk of legal work 
in France lies in the provinces, and this system of resident 
courts was yet more marked before the Revolution. In 
his province no code, but a mass of local custom, decided 
most criminal and nearly all civil decisions. These cus- 
toms gave a complexity to the system of law which made 
it at once necessary and profitable to fix one's practice 
permanently in a provincial capital. By this means a 
man became a specialist in a matter that required the 
greatest industry to master; he was secure against an 
overstocking of the market in so hard a business. The 
confusion that these ancient customs made was increased 
by a mass of conflicting and over-lapping jurisdictions^ that 
had their source in the same immemorial conservatism. 
It was a handsome living in itself to be able to give ad- 
vice to clients as to the boundaries; of these jurisdictions 
or the chances of his case escapmg the interference of 
a side court as third party. It needs no further descrip- 
tion of such abuses to show what opportunities they 
afforded to individual application, and how by mere ex- 
ample they forced men to react towards simplicity and 
reform. His first pleadings, however, did not last beyond 
a couple of terms. ^ 

The friendship of De Conzi^, and the academic suc- 
cess which had so well rewarded his first patronage, 
led that bishop to ofier Robespierre within a j'^ear of 
his being called to the bar one of the minor judicial 

^ For instance, in Arras itself there were the Seigniorial Courts, the 
Bishop's, the King's and that of the Abbey of St. Wast, all existing side by 
side, with ill -defined jurisdictions; and superior to them all, though 
possessing no very exact powers, the provincial Council instituted by 
Charles V. in 1530. 

'^ Michaelmas, 1781, and Hilary, 1782. At the end of the latter term 
he was offered the post I speak of. 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 63 

posts within his gift. He was installed a magistrate 
in the ecclesiastical court. Insignificant as the office 
was, it carried with it, in the wretched conditions of 
the times, the power of life and death. Within a few 
months its duties disgusted a character in which the 
demand for reform and the faith in Rousseau, if pedantic 
and reiterated, were yet profoundly sincere. This dis- 
gust, springing in the main from his tenacity of opinion 
and a just estimate of the ignominies of the criminal 
law, was undoubtedly heightened in the case of Robes- 
pierre by ,the foibles that already warped his attitude 
towards the world. He was not without nervousness; 
his judgments, like his style, erred continually upon 
the side of sensibility. The classes also which lay 
in misery below his own somewhat perturbed his cul- 
ture, as they certainly much more excited his sense 
of justice. It may have been as a general conse- 
quence of its duties that he resigned his place; it 
would seem more probable, as his sister directly testifies, 
that he abandoned it under the shock of having to pass 
a capital sentence.^ In any case he begged to be 
relieved of the office, and lost by that decision neither 
the respect of his benefactor nor the prestige he had 
begun to enjoy among his neighbours. 

He returned to his ordinary practice, and his success 
was immediate ; but from the outset he mixed with that 
success a characteristic reputation for scruple. He wished 
to be singled out for his justice and his defence of the 
poor. He introduced into the most particular cases the 
most general and inopportune considerations — but he 
continually won his case. He won a case for the Carnots, 
whom he already knew, recovering a legacy for an old 
servant of theirs; but he so dragged in the immutable 
principles that the younger Carnot swore at him in court. 
He gave the most excellent advice to a man who had 

1 "Memoirs of Charlotte Robespierre," first edition, p. 69. 



64 ROBESPIERRE 

been disinlierited under a will that left a large fortune 
"under condition of joining tlie reformed church"; the 
will was null at law, but Robespierre could not be content 
with saying this and giving legal reason, he adds in his 
advice to his client (a priest), " Remember that there is 
no more formidable enemy to liberty than fanaticism." 

A much more famous case, one that went far on appeal 
and that, by the nature of the case, brought his name for 
a moment before the eighteenth- century philosophers, 
was a defence of the wealthy Yissery who had put up a 
lightning conductor on his house at St. Omer, and had 
thereby so affrighted an old maid, his neighbour, that she 
prosecuted him and his conductor as a public danger. 
It was ordered to be pulled down. On appeal this was 
reversed. On further appeal (when Robespierre is em- 
ployed) the final decision was a kind of compromise. 
The mind of Robespierre was made for such a case. 
Here was philosophy and all the light of the century 
called into question ! Here was Franklin to be de- 
fended ! The very narrowness of his sincerity and zeal 
lent him power, and in a little while, what with his 
rising name and the nature of his brief, a certain fame 
spread about his subject. After winning his case 
in May 1783 (a bare year since he had accepted the 
magistracy of which I have spoken, and within a few 
months of his resignation) he was permanently estab- 
lished in the reputation that led at last to Paris. 

Of the years that follow not very much has been 
preserved ; their general tenor and the further foundation 
of his good position alone is certain. A few letters, one 
specially famous, a few decisions, are all the documents 
that remain. It was during this period of his early 
manhood, as he approached his thirtieth year, that he 
added to his legal work the literary industry I have 
already described. It is to these years also that belong 
the vague traditions upon which a faint legend rather 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 65 

than a history has grown. There was some talk of a 
marriage between himself and his cousin, Anais Des- 
horties.-^ The project was not pursued, and certainly 
neither here nor at any other time can you connect him 
with a romance. Even at the very end, when he felt 
that he was leaving the world and walked at sunset in 
Thermidor with Eleanor Duplay up the wooded hill of 
Passy, the woman with him was not near to him. The 
vague attraction of his voice and the false appeal which 
his over-sensitiveness produced led to this or that passage 
of sentiment, but — almost alone of the men of the 
Revolution — he brings in no interest of love. 

These years, in every rare detail that survives, em- 
phasise the absorption into one social class of which 
I have spoken. He never signs without the " de " ; he 
addresses Carnot by that title on his reception into the 
Academy. His dogmatic Uberalism spares the Churches, 
maintains the decencies, and is concealed by all the 
habits of the old rank which he has recovered. Ten 
men were present when — at the close of this period — 
he received the Duke of Guines as a guest of his literary 
society. He was careful to allude to " citizens " in 
his address, but the ten men who heard him were all 
noblesse — of the sword or the gown. In his daily life, 
too, he merged with the industrious but protected class 
which these accidents indicate. He woke at six, worked 
in his study till eight, pleased by the sound of birds. 
Then he would spend the ample care that fashion 
demanded upon his person. The barber came to shave 
and powder him; he drank his glass of milk and went 
out across the square to the courts. They rose at two, 
and when he had returned to the principal early meal 
that is still the custom of the north, he walked abroad 
a little ; sometimes for the stiff ritual of his calls, more 

^ The daughter of his father's sister. She later married a lawyer of 
Arras, and died in 1847. 

E 



ee ROBESPIERRE 

often alone. And these walks, in wliich his solitude 
followed that of his literary master, he would enshrine 
in amiable but unimportant prose. He arranged his 
papers for the evening, supped, worked again in his 
study for a while, and slept at ten. And these very 
common habits of his time and profession he coloured 
only by a meticulous regularity and by a curious self- 
absorption. He was by nature absent-minded ; somewhat 
from shortness of sight but more from the bent of his 
temper; over-thoughtful in the street, even forgetful of 
immediate things and details ; a little silent amid the 
conversation of his friends. 

With all this he did not miss at all the general tide 
about him; he was ready, months before the States- 
General met, to address an audience as " the possible 
makers of a new world " ; his written advice in two 
legal cases — one concerning the rights of Bastards, the 
other a Lettre de Cachet — are a little more certain, a 
little more forward even than the general average of 
the assertions and passages which announced the coming 
change. 

He was, then, by his established repute, by the known 
bent of his politics, by his freedom from all entanglement 
and by the expository position he had acquired (in the 
district men already expected his pleadings and his 
essays), marked out for a place in the new politics. In 
the August of 1788 the news reached Arras that the 
States-General were to be summoned; he launched at 
once his pamphlet or manifesto : " An Appeal to the 
Artesian People." 

This pamphlet, an octavo of some eighty pages, has 
a quality of immediate and practical application which 
was rare in the run of his appeals. It contains, of 
course, a certain excess of frigid oratory. That was 
not his alone : it was the time's. But it has also a 
certain detail of analysis; it expresses a number of 



DESCENT AND YOUTH 67 

definite grievances peculiar to the province, and, what is 
more remarkable, it deals exactly with the historical 
origins of the peculiar complexity of jurisdiction and 
tenure under which Artois laboured. It meets and expects 
the practical arguments of opponents. It was bought and 
read immediately, and its edition was exhausted.^ It 
made more sure what was already sure — his candidature ; 
it placed him higher in the order of election than, for 
all his solid reputation, his youth might otherwise have 
permitted. 

The decree fixing the nature of the elections and 
the number of the Commons appeared in January 
1789. In March he issued, not a pamphlet, but a 
direct and personal declaration of his candidature. 
Moderate as it is, one can find in it the self-regard and 
the self-mirroring of '94 — and it closes with this sen- 
tence, five years before its time : " The Supreme Being 
will hear my prayers. He knows their sincerity 
and their fervour. I can hope that He will fulfil 
them." 

In Arras the election was complicated to a degree. 
I will not weary my readers with its recital. In the 
first general meeting he was chosen. In the second 
electoral college he was chosen again — the 13 th out of 
180 names. On the 26th of April, when the final 
choice of eight members of the Commons was made, 
he passed with some difficulty, the 5 th upon the list, 
and his political career began. 

It is not the details of such a confused machinery 
that interest history: it is the attitude of Robespierre 
during the last week of this trial. He seemed to have 
found an atmosphere and to have awakened. He spoke 
incessantly, eagerly, and well. He made himself the 
mouthpiece of a protest of the Commons against the 

1 I know of no original copy. In the form in which it may now be 
consulted, it has received many later additions from his pen. 



68 ROBESPIERRE 

privileged orders ; ^ lie helped to draw up tlie grievances 
of the surrounding parishes : he had found his trade. 

That exceptional energy spent itself in success, but 
though exhausted in so few days it was typical of those 
rare occasions in the life before him, when sudden (or 
long-nourished but newly apparent) ambitions lifted him 
from one step to another in his career. 

On the first of May the united deputies of the 
province met in the cathedral. On the morrow Robes- 
pierre went back into insignificance ; but the coach 
was on the Paris road, and he knew that his stage was 
to be the world. 

^ This is but a conjecture, based upon an allusion to "a persistent and 
interrupting lawyer " among the Commons, in a contemporary letter of 
the Due de Guines. The Duke was president of the Combined Electoral 
College of the Artois. 



CHAPTER III 

VERSAILLES 

Late in tlie afternoon of Monday, the third of May, the 
deputies of the three orders began to fill Versailles. 
With them life and an influence of crowds was pouring 
up the long valley, threatening the majestic Park, the 
dead order and magnificence of the three avenues, the 
formal trees, the silent regularity of the palace. Spring 
introduced this advent of ideas; the new leaves in 
Satory, the easy airs, the clear twilight of lengthening 
days mixed in with the promise of change; nothing 
stood certain, but everything was troubled with expecta- 
tion and renewal. This ferment working France and 
the city had thrown out an essence — the Parliament. It 
was to discover in itself the quality of a vintage, to 
remember the oldest things in the soil and to create. 

This force of many men turned corporate, this crowd 
which was like all France caught in a mirror, mingled 
with and passed through the throngs that Paris had sent 
up, curious or applauding, to the royal town, and Ver- 
sailles added to them all the gardens of her wide roads. 
Eddies impeded the flowing of the streets ; the German 
of the palace guard, the new political catchwords of the 
populace, the last epigram of the cynics surrounded the 
more famous as they were set down at their lodgings ; 
faces that had already a vague reputation arrested the 
crowd. Mounier from the mountains, where the first 
protest had been read, half-drowned in the roar of the 
Romanche outside the hall; the long, hard visage of 

Si^yfes, certain, dry as his pamphlets ; the angry, great 

69 



70 ROBESPIERRE 

head of Mirabeau. Through all this, among the very 
least of the new-comers, unknown in a mass of un- 
knowns, Robespierre passed down with his few com- 
panions, to the cheap sign of the Fox in the Rue Sainte- 
EHzabeth.^ 

The little glories of Arras dropped off him into the 
distance; he was lonely, and content to be lonely. It 
seemed that in a new world so vast and so represen- 
tative nothing could raise him from insignificance. In 
that new world he began, from the very outset of the 
debates, steadily and imperceptibly to rise. How ? The 
contrast of his beginning and his end is so striking, and 
its comprehension so vital to his story, that, before telling 
of his first actions in the Parliament, I would state and 
examine the problem it involves. 

Robespierre in the Artois, successful, narrow, con- 
fined to provincial destinies, and filling easily without 
the strain of high ambition or of unfulfilled capacities a 
place half inherited and wholly congenial, presented a 
definite figure. That career of local conventions and 
middlinsc dignities, the best of what Arras could afford 
and as ample as the little circle of the town permitted, 
suited him, as did his careful, hardly fashionable clothes, 
or the pedantic accuracy in accent and grammar which 
often rises from the uneasy pride of a country town. 
His rigidity of conviction was indeed suitable for great 
scenes, but it was of its nature neither troubling as are 
enthusiasms, nor pushed from within by destiny as is a 
creative genius. Versailles could not find in him a for- 
gotten principle to be revived, a new message to be 
given, nor a great act to be accomplished ; and on that 
account, because his principal quality of faith accepted 
only what so many then agreed upon, and because of 

' This street, somewhat lengthened in the modern town, has become 
the Rue Duplessis. 



VERSAILLES 71 

its very security and absoluteness, it is easy to imagine 
him, had the Revolution not called him from his Pro- 
vince, living to old age a small unfamous life, to be 
enshrined later in a biography of local worthies. In re- 
habilitating the legal reputation of his family, and in 
leaving a decent tradition to the freehold in the Rue des 
Rapporteurs, he would have done enough and have been 
thoroughly himself. 

At home, therefore, he is an explicable man. Nor 
will it prove impossible, as I hope this book will show, 
to find a just place for him in his later domination, when 
his name had become a sign in Europe, and was used 
currently throughout France as the token of the Re- 
volution. 

But if the origins of his career present no problem, 
and if even his latter tragedy is fitted to its time, there 
lies between them a link that has constantly disturbed 
the calculations of historians. For the first twelve 
months of the Parliament, without interruption or per- 
ceptible date of origin, his influence steadily increased 
from a nonentity to a kind of fame, until by 1790 it 
was clearly seen that he might pass from that mere fame 
onwards to the position of a master. The enormous 
disturbance that wholly recast the society of his country 
seemed to preserve for him some similar environment 
from which he derived the nourishment of his increase, 
and he grew continually in the same soil. What was 
there in 1789 to indicate its presence? Into what 
could the unknown and somewhat paltry figure strike 
root at Versailles in the first brilliant months of the 
States-General, where unanimity of purpose impressed 
six hundred men, and was led by the best talent of 
the nation ? where wit and generosity and experience, 
coupled with all the self-satisfaction of an exclusive 
culture and of protected wealth, formed an area for such 
a wide mind as Mirabeau's, and seemed repugnant at 



72 ROBESPIERRE 

once to the incessant dogmatism of Robespierre's tempei* 
and to tlie species of idolatry upon which he was later 
to depend. 

A Picard, young without youth, very middle- class for 
his pretensions, wearying with his reiterations the chance 
few that met him, mediocre in literary ability though 
touched by literary ambition; capable, apparently, of 
little but affirmations (and these delivered in a voice of 
no great strength, read through great spectacles from 
manuscripts that desired, but were rarely permitted, to be 
interminable), he was but a lost unit among the hundreds 
whose rallying points were the trained advocacy of 
Cazales, the laconic summaries of Sieyfes, the wit of 
Talleyrand, the loud facility of Maury, the proper liberal 
breadth of Lafayette, the Irish energy of poor Lally,^ the 
knowledge of men that added distinction to the falsity of 
the Archbishop of Aix, the early enthusiasms of Barnave, 
and the dominating genius of Mirabeau. It is no wonder 
that he was lost in such a summary of France and that, 
had we nothing of the later time, he would remain all 
but unknown. 

The obscure, but firm position which, in spite of his 
insignificance, he took up for himself at this outset of the 
Revolution, the emplacement where he could repose, and 
upon which was firmly planted the ladder of his rise, lay 
in a little group whose place in the States-General, the 
memoirs of fashionable contemporaries have minimised, 
and which history therefore tends to take too little 
into account. The Assembly, coalesced by an accident, 
rejecting by an instinct common to all French delibera- 
tions the spirit of party (there were no political in- 
heritances to preserve nor highly salaried posts to be 
obtained), turned, not to registering the decrees of a 

^ It must have been Lally's son that died, an old man, some six years 
ago, in Soho. Poor and quite alone. Supported by the charity of the 
French Hospital. 



VERSAILLES 73 

government, but to tlie framing of true decisions tliat 
were tlie fruit of living debates ; and it was led by several 
and independent orators. To the extreme left, bearing 
with them the future fortunes of the Keform, the Garats, 
Volneys, St. Etiennes, Gregoires, Barnaves — men whose 
very names later stand separate and hostile — afforded at 
that moment a solid nucleus round which the principles 
of 1789 could crystallise and take on form. This at- 
mosphere of an uncompromising theory was not so much 
the most favourable, it was rather the only, centre of 
action for a man destined to be a leader in the later 
Revolution. Save these, no organic part of the Assembly 
survived ; rare individuals, disunited, " lived," and came 
at last to be saved by Robespierre in '93 and in Ther- 
midor to manage his death. They were but spectators ; 
the actors of the change were the extremists of '89. 

It may be asked how names, not yet famous, some 
of them absolutely unknown, could find in an obscure 
corner of that great Parliament the framing necessary 
to their future renown and power ; the answer lies in 
considering the nature of leadership in war rather than 
the ordinary development of political life. The rapid 
succession of the Revolution, each phase introduced by 
arms, approaches much more nearly, in what may be 
called " the physics " of its development, to a campaign 
than to a political reform. Therefore the element in- 
separable from a prolonged struggle — an element some- 
times absent in the defeated camp but always present 
upon the side that will ultimately be victorious — appeared 
among the revolutionary leaders ; unknown or untried 
men, many even that had seemed incapable of sound 
general judgment, yet having in them an intimate sym- 
pathy with the terrain and with the character of the 
war, become of themselves the successful generals at its 
close. 

Now Robespierre was in no sense such a leader, but his 



74 ROBESPIERRE 

reiteration of tlie Rousseauan theory threw him at once 
among them, and the band in which he moved, himself 
the least regarded, was altogether composed of such men. 
They went on ahead of the Revolution, and as the great 
laws were one by one decreed, these laws did but fill 
up formulae which the extremists were remembered to 
have pronounced. A fatality of success distinguished 
such minorities throughout the movement. They al- 
ready held as a faith defined what France as yet held 
only vaguely by instinct : they could not fail to become 
the depositories of the creed. So the Mountain in 1792 
(hated for September, and repulsive to the Plain), yet 
acquired the mastery of the Convention. So, earlier, 
in 1 79 1 the Girondins of the Legislative, ridiculed a 
little for their idealism, vain and at first defeated, yet 
made the policy of the nation and accelerated the war. 
So here at the outset, in 1789, the weak Left were to 
dictate to a half-unwilling Assembly principles which the 
event of every struggle confirmed. 

They were certain; and the tension of that certainty 
of theirs became like a cord stretched to a special note; 
when the note was sounded France without responded 
in harmony. Faith, then, proved the strongest thing; 
and the doubts of the pedants, the reluctant hypocrisy of 
the Right, the invective of the last of the wits broke against 
it. This was the gate by which Robespierre came in. 

On the 4th of May, in a scene that a dozen re- 
lations have rendered memorable, the States-General 
met in the Church of Our Lady for the Veni Creator, 
and filed out in order through the silent crowd to hear 
the Mass of the Holy Ghost at St. Louis. Dressed in 
the black court suit that was uniform to the whole 
600 Commons, in his sword and his silk cape, Robes- 
pierre, mixed with a pomp and ritual that were congenial 
to him, entered upon the career of debate which was 



VERSAILLES 75 

to become his whole being. His mind that knew no 
attachment to the theatrical, and had but little ap- 
preciation of the dramatic, yet had, in common with 
that of every mystic, a sense of symbolism and a need 
for externals. The scene in St. Louis, the liberal and 
even startling sermon of the Bishop of Nancy, the shock 
of the public applause, confirmed whatever imagination 
he had framed in Arras of the role of the States-General. 
The vigorous origins that dignified the march of the 
Commons into history, the unanimity that was their 
earliest character, and the special form that their demand 
obtained, provided his introduction to public life ; and 
his nature, which was not devoid of timidity, and which 
was easily convinced of isolation, received every en- 
couragement to action when he found the Third Estate 
so imbued with his Rousseau as to proclaim a theoretic 
right on the second day of its session, and to insist above 
all things upon a name : they would sit in one house 
with the nobility and clergy; they would depend only 
on the absolute mandate of the whole nation; they 
demanded the title of National Assembly.^ 

Such encouragement, then, moved him to action. 
What form did that action take ? If he succeeded in 
launching himself into a world that knew nothing of 
him and desired but little acquaintance with the dryness 
of chance provincials, it was by an extreme assiduity. 
So negligible was his person, and so ineffective his 
method of address at this date and with such an 
audience, that one discovers the nature of his activity 
only by putting together very various and meagre testi- 
monies. For months the half-official MoniteiLr does not 
mention his name; for half a year, even Barrfere with 
his thousands of careful notes, misspells it ; upon more than 

1 The term "National Assembly" was not, as has been pretended, 
new or irregular. It had, indeed, no historical precedent, but it had 
been, for five months before the Parliament met, the common phrase by 
which it was described, even in the letters of the court. 



*j6 ROBESPIERRE 

one occasion he is " Mr. X ," and his generalisations 

are sometimes cut short in the reports by an ignoble "&c." 

The States-General had not been sitting eight days 
when the Commons heard for the first time the accurate 
articulation and the weak but carrying voice which were 
destined to become a vehicle of command and to assume 
the power of the Republic. 

It was on Tuesday, the twelfth of May, that he went 
up into the Tribune to suggest an amendment to the 
motion of Rabaut St. Etienne, who, in the general demand 
that was rising for the adhesion of the nobility and the 
clergy, and the unity of the Assembly, had attempted 
conciliation and had urged the sending of a deputation to 
confer with the two privileged orders and to attempt 
their conversion. The amendment for which Robespierre 
pleaded and which he laid on the table in form, was in 
itself insignificant ; partly from the uncertainty of the 
procedure, partly because its author was unknown, the 
amendment was not even put, but it is worthy of notice 
not only as his first political act, but because it exhibits a 
character which, for all his phrasing, was a principal part 
of his later ascendency. He had the touch of assemblies ; 
he grasped with rapidity their general spirit, distin- 
guished it from its individual components, saw where 
the avenues of persuasion lay, and had an instinct how 
Parliaments might be led and how controlled. In this 
amendment he had advised a double action consonant to 
the separate characters of the two houses in question. 
To the clergy, largely elected in opposition to the hier- 
archy, and full of the new enthusiasm, he proposed an 
appeal; to the nobles, whose majority he had justly 
weighed, he would have sent nothing but a formal sum- 
mons. It would certainly be refused, but it would con- 
stitute an act and be of record.^ 

^ This, his first speech, we should know nothing of from the papers. 
He spoke late in the debate, and his name was not yet known. We hear 



VERSAILLES 77 

To see in this amendment an act of forensic judgment 
it is not necessary to depend upon tlie doubtful appre- 
ciations we may form to-day. Tlie masterly grasp of 
Mirabeau fixed upon Robespierre's suggestion; he may 
have passed the sentence so commonly attributed to him 
and declared that the young lawyer from Artois " would 
go far, for he believed all he said " ; it is certain that on 
this day (the first in which Mirabeau had so much as 
heard of Robespierre) he adopted the proposal, and the 
motion that Mirabeau brought forward upon the following 
Monday, the 1 8th, was in substance Robespierre's own. 

The incident was the first example of a quality I 
have already described. Things that were very close 
to him he could thus judge with accuracy, especially 
if they had to do with the play of a deliberative 
assembly, but in proportion as they were distant from 
his immediate surroundings and foreign to the nature 
of debate he lost his hold upon them. The close of 
his Hfe will show his ignorance of the provinces in 
his hesitation to appeal to them ; of Paris in his law of 
the 22 nd Prairial; of the campaigns in his arrest of 
Hoche and suspicions of Carnot, and especially of Foreign 
Affairs in his crude abandonment of the intricate and 
well-organised scheme that Danton had conceived in 

1793. 

Had the work of the Constituent Assembly proceeded 
in a social medium more lethargic than that of France, 
and had an incomplete and dangerous reform worked 
itself out amidst the commonplace self-sufficiency of the 
wealthy ; had that compromise, which so many have since 
desired, been established; had the liberal nobility per- 
suaded the squires, or had the commons discovered the 
perils of the ideal, Robespierre would have moved securely 
and low down in a society that was his own : his name 

of it only in his own letter to Buissart at Arras, written on the 24th of 
May. 



78 ROBESPIERRE 

gradually assuming so much importance as to be correctly 
spelt in the newspapers and his person becoming as well 
known in drawing-rooms as that of a hundred others. 
Ridiculed somewhat for his intense and narrow creed, 
treated impatiently for dogmatism and self-repetition, he 
would yet have formed a useful member of the committee 
to which he was attached, he would have returned to 
Arras full of little honours for the provincial town to 
magnify, and would have found his life well content in a 
society where order should have been established upon a 
comfortable and gradual decline of power. 

He was not of those who were then possessed with 
the first driving energy of the new time, and it was with 
frigidity and a slight astonishment that he saw the 
great summer of '89 riot past him. In his social exacti- 
tude, his phrases and his reticence, he was still the old 
regime provincial I have described, and that other part of 
him, the little shrine wherein he kept his principles as 
hard as diamonds, did nothing for him in the interval 
between the first orderly meeting of the States-General 
and the days — nearly a year after — when Paris began 
to take up an articulate creed of reform. Once that 
desire was felt in the capital it was of necessity that this 
man, whose peculiar quality it was to be the exponent of 
one idea, should fill more and more the place reserved to 
the functionaries of a creed, until at last a sharp moment 
of fanaticism seemed to promise him a complete mastery 
because he had always kept the faith. But of that crea- 
tive passion which was to generous minds the principal 
gift of the Revolution he felt as yet no breath, and even 
later, when he had become a leader, it was long his 
single service to enunciate and define as though no storm 
blew. 

His history, therefore, in a time whose every act merits 
the detailed attention of Europe — for in that summer our 
new life was founded — is but the history of an isolated 



VERSAILLES 79 

mind. The great days that the Kevolt drove like a 
charioteer, left him silent ; and amid all the reputations, 
some that came suddenly out of the earth, and some that 
fell as suddenly into contempt or nothingness, his alone 
stood still, unmade and unendangered. He grew to be 
somewhat noticed as a useful member of the Left ; and if 
one gathers what little evidence remains of his interior 
life during the whirlpool of June and July, one finds only 
set phrases, the expected content in political success, a 
little astonishment, and here and there an example of 
that close but ill-selecting observation -^ which was the foil 
to his perpetual abstraction, and to his common errors of 
judgment. He spoke not unfrequently, always as un- 
certain of his position before the Assembly as he was 
certain of his thesis ; he was listened to very carelessly, 
and reported more carelessly still. 

Once, indeed, during the whole two months he excited 
some general attention and applause when he replied 
with rhetoric of unusual strength to the Archbishop of 
Aix, who had come, holding a piece of black bread, to beg 
a grant from the Commons for the poor, but who desired 
only to prolong the quarrel of the orders till an armed 
reaction might reconquer privilege. 

" You are the minister of a sublime religion which has 
poverty at its foundations ... go and tell your col- 
leagues that they need delay the Commons no longer 
with the affectation of urgency ... for your canons 
permit you to sell the very vessels of the altar in the 
cause of the poor ; you have no need of such resources. 
You have but to dismiss your liveries, and to sell your 
coaches, and to empty your palaces somewhat ; you will 
find ample material for largesse." 

The style was inspired by Mirabeau, and though such 

1 Thus this (in his letter of the 24th) on Target : " ... Every one was 
on tip-toe to bear him, with his great reputation. He gave vent to a 
number of commonplaces, which he very much emphasised, and we soon 
saw that he was a greatly overrated man." 



8o ROBESPIERRE 

passages were found more frequently in his speeclies as 
the Revolution advanced, they remained something exotic 
to the literary flavour of his work. Had he been fitted 
to achieve, or had he learnt that spontaneity which made 
the first reputations of '89, he would have taken his place 
far more rapidly before the Assembly and the caste that 
still governed the nation : a caste to which in part he be- 
longed. But he would also have fallen into the struggle 
of violent parties, and have been lost very early under the 
name of some faction. He would not have advanced by 
that kind of subterranean way of his, unmolested, and 
emerging at last into a secure popularity, above the 
arena. 

He did indeed, in the end of May, take a step 
calculated to secure his position with his party. The 
province of Brittany that is always the evening or the 
morning star of France, that preserved and organised 
the national spirit of Gaul when Rome fell, that alone 
determinedly opposed the unity of the middle ages, 
that is now proud of a picturesque isolation, was then a 
forerunner of the Revolution. Its deputies of the 
Commons and most of its clergy^ joined to form a 
society that was at Versailles the only definite and well- 
arranged group of radicals : meeting first in the vault, 
later on the first floor ^ of the Caf^ Amaury at the corner 
of the Rue de la Pompe and the main road to St. Cloud. 
The Left in general saw the tactical advantage of such an 
organisation ; Mirabeau, Barnave, Gregoire, obtained admis- 
sion, until at last in June, with close upon two hundred 
members, who met before each debate and drew up their 

^ The noblesse of Brittany had taken the singular resolution of boy- 
cotting the States-General. They sat at home and solemnly ratified or 
rejected its decrees. 

'^ At least that is the only way in -which we can reconcile the 
"Souterrain" of Montjoie (ii. 121), the "Cavern" of Dumont, and the 
detailed account that an eye-witness (M. Auge) gave to M. Th^nard 
(who communicated it to Aulard) of the meeting in the first floor. 
M. Aug6 remembered and preserved the chair of Robespierre. 



VERSAILLES 8i 

programme, they were easily the leaders of the Assembly. 
This " Brutus club " Robespierre of course joined. But 
he was not content with joining only. He was careful 
to be among its earliest arrivals, he was present at its 
least-attended meetings, and he thus gave evidence of 
that instinct (for it was instinct rather than plan) 
whereby he recognised the immense force which such 
caucuses, disciplined and exterior to the main deliberative 
body, exercise in politics. Such later, and with a power 
irresistibly increased, were the Jacobins. 

For the rest, he was still the minor official lost in 
the general mass of the Assembly. His voice was not 
heard on the day when the decisive step was taken, 
and when Sieyes proposed and carried his last appeal to 
the clergy and the nobility. When a week later the 
Commons took the name of National Assembly, on the 
1 2th of June, and began by that illegality the triumph of 
ordered law, he was equally silent. Whether or no the 
religious leaning of his character, and the love of ceremony 
that was in it led him with Bailly to the procession of 
the Corpus Christi, remains unknown ; we know that he 
did not vote for the observation of the Feast. On that 
famous Saturday, two days after, when the six hundred 
deputies stood in the rain before the locked and guarded 
door of their hall, he was but an insignificant point of 
the gathering, catching from the rumours that reached 
its further ranks the purport of the insult that the king 
had offered them. He went in with them all across the 
streaming pavement, and under the dull sky to the 
Tennis Court in the Rue St. Francois ; he took, as others 
did, the oath to give France a constitution, and signed 
the roll with the rest. But all that increasing furnace 
did not reach his heart or consume him, for there was 
nothing in his mind inflammable, and David was inspired 
by a later time when he drew him in that scene with 
two hands upon his breast " as though he had two hearts 

F 



82 ROBESPIERRE 

for liberty." He must liave stood at the foot of the 
table whence Bailly dictated the vow, as reserved and 
apart as he had remained in the Assembly; seeing in 
that bare and memorable hall the scene of nothing 
more than a natural political success. He assisted, silent 
as ever, at the Royal Session of the following Tuesday, 
and heard stubbornly, like any other of the Parliament, 
the last vigorous pronouncement of the French Crown. 
He remained with the deserted Commons at its close and 
witnessed Mirabeau's gesture of defiance to De Brez^, and 
the angry repartee, which, like the majority of historical 
phrases, has become permanent under an altered form.^ 
Five days later the Commons had been joined by the 
greater part of the clergy, and by that liberal nobility 
of which Robespierre had himself given to a friend so 
inadequate a description.^^s 

This crisis in the history of the National Assembly 
renewed the opportunities in which he could appear ; it 
was the moment for deputations between the Commons 
and the recalcitrants of the two orders, and the Com- 
mons, strengthened in their revolt against the Crown by 
the adhesion of so many clergy and of a few great lords, 
rapidly assumed an assured position. When Mirabeau's 
proposal to send a committee to treat with the king had 
passed, Robespierre, because he already seemed to repre- 
sent a group of the extreme Left, was chosen to join it 
with Mirabeau himself, Petion, Buzot, and the rest of 
the twelve. It was on Friday, the loth of July, that 
the committee or deputation attended at the palace to 
urge the king to yield. We have no record of how this 

1 Mirabeau's own words — at least as he himself relates them in his 
thirteenth letter to his constituents — are much tamer than the famous 
" we are here by the will of the people." They are longer, and end with 
"... then you must ask for the employment of force, for we shall not 
leave our places save under the pressure of bayonets." 

2 In the letter of the 24th of May. "Keasonable men, in very small 
number, and even they not exempt from the prejudices of their class. . . ." 
Moreover, he confounds Lafayette and the Due d'Orleans in one batch 



VERSAILLES 83 

second personal interview with tlie king, whom he had 
not addressed since the speech-day at Louis-le-Grand, 
alBfected Robespierre ; ^ but we know that the king's reply 
was a declaration of war against the Assembly. On the 
morrow Necker was dismissed, and with the loss of that 
self-sufficient banker, the Parliament at Versailles, and, 
what was of greater moment, the liberal opinion of Paris, 
knew that the king had abandoned the respectable solu- 
tions of half-foreign philosophers, had ignored the tide 
of France, and had taken refuge with the soldiers. He 
had determined to appeal to the swords around him, to his 
nobility, and to the emblazoned traditions that still hang 
like a vain and antique ornament upon western society. 
But the result of the conflict neither the Assembly, nor 
the Crown, nor the nobility could guess ; a real France, 
full of the old epics, of laughter, and of tragedy, rose up 
and enthroned herself and dwarfed them all. 

All the world knows what followed the dismissal of 
Necker : Camille Desmoulins running into the garden of 
the Palais Royal with the news, astonishing and rousing 
the Sunday morning crowd ; the Monday spent in arms ; 
next day, the 14th of July, the fall of the Bastille and 
the capitulation of the Court. 

Robespierre was not among the hundred deputies 
that went to Paris on the 15 th at the instance of the 
king, with Bailly at their head, and found the town 
"like a wood of muskets," but he was appointed to be 
one of the second hundred that accompanied the king 
the next day, and that saw him receive at the Poissy 
gate the keys that Henry IV. had accepted, when, two 
hundred years before, there had been founded that splen- 
did power which was now stripped even of its externals. 
He collected with care the signs of the popular feeling, 

1 In a second letter of his (written on July 23rd) one might expect 
some description of his feelings at the palace, but there is only a common- 
place denunciation of the intrigues of the Court against the Assembly. 



84 ROBESPIERRE 

noted the cheers for the nation as the king passed into 
the Hotel de Ville, for the Crown as he came out of it 
with the national cockade. Then for the rest of the 
week, when the greater part of his colleagues had re- 
turned to Versailles, he passed with curiosity rather than 
enthusiasm over the sites which the struggle had rendered 
famous, and heard for the first time the applause of the 
street ; for every deputy of the Commons was deified at 
that moment.^ 

With that experience, or rather with his return to 
Versailles and the deputies six days later, closes the first 
stage of his entry into public life. It had been passed 
in a succession of scenes, each throbbing up higher as 
water throbs with a rising energy from an open sluice, 
until at last the old society in one day and night was 
overwhelmed. He had come to the time when the first 
emigrants began their fatal treason, when Conde had 
passed the frontier, and when the king's younger brother, 
the Comte d'Artois, had fled in company with that family 
of Polignac which was later to ruin him and his house. 
But all that drama had passed him by and left him still 
similar to himself, secure in the narrow confines of his 
exact intelligence, and quite untouched by passion. 

We have a picture of his mind during those two 
months, not only in the brief reports of his rare speeches, 
but in two letters which he wrote to a friend in Arras, 
the one at the close of May, the other just at the point 
we have reached, when he re-entered Versailles after his 
visit to Paris on the fall of the Bastille. In both, written 
under what should have been such different conditions 
of emotion, the same paleness of thought, the same 
absolute phrases are to be discovered ; the same mixture 
of sound general appreciations and astonishingly false 
particular judgments. He sees that Mounier and Target 
cannot last, but on the same page he calls Mirabeau 

* All this is in his letter of the 23rd to Buissart. 



VERSAILLES 85 

" nul," and gravely prophesies that his position will be 
destroyed by the evil effect of his reputed morals. He 
describes with enthusiasm the king coming bareheaded 
to the Assembly to announce the renunciation of his 
former claims on hearing of the fall of the Bastille ; he 
puts some energy and much acuteness into his picture 
of the king's entry into Paris. But the enthusiasm, the 
energy, and the detail all express themselves in phrases 
of a false ring. " Tyranny," " despotisms," and all the 
simple extremes do service for the complexity of the 
royal claim and tradition. The words lack stuff; he 
can find no epithet for the conquered Bastille but " s^jour 
delicieux," and the commonplace is the foundation of the 
whole : for all the world like a sermon or a leading article. 
The scaffolding of the old world had given way with a 
crash ; the dust of the ruin still hung in the air, and the 
noise of it was rolling out to the kings beyond the Rhine 
and the Channel when this slight and rather dapper 
lawyer, erect and often thinly smiling, was hurrying, 
full of an amiable curiosity, through an armed Paris, with 
national guards to show him the lions, and gratified by 
the occasional applause of passers-by, who noticed a 
deputy, but did not yet know so much as his name. 
Underneath this grotesquely petty surface, and fixed 
into this common spirit, there lay the certitudes upon 
whose display the whole people would one day insist, as 
upon relics or gems, till they came to worship the man 
who always wore them as the unique furniture of his 
mind. 

The Versailles and the Assembly which he found on 
his return from Paris were new. August and September 
were an origin ; all the entanglement of existing and 
legal privilege had been cut, and the great doubt as 
to whether a reform would be possible 01 no was solved. 
The Revolution had begun ; it was in order ; it was the 
Law. To arrest it a counter-stroke, itself illegal and 



86 ROBESPIERRE 

violent, would be needed, and the Crown had partly 
lost the principal resource for such a counter-plan — I 
mean the Administration, which in countries long or- 
ganised as bureaucracies is a fine net holding in all the 
state. The Administration where it was new (as in the 
municipalities), owed its life directly or indirectly to the 
Assembly; where it was old (as in the courts of law), 
tended to admit its authority. There was indeed a 
violent opposition to the majority in the now united 
Parliament, but there was no open opposition to the 
existence of such a Parliament ; unless indeed we count 
that splendid scatter-brain who daily paced up and down 
his solitary hour in the empty hall that had been the 
House of the nobles, and thus made act and record that 
there were still Lords in the constitution. 

Now therefore, that the way to remodelling France 
was open, there arose for reasoning men a necessity of 
definition: renunciations and affirmations to baptize 
democracy, and the recital of a creed which is the first 
business of conviction if it is to be practical and to 
build upon a sure design. With every formula an iu- 
stitution would be born, but the new things rose out 
of the idea and were seen clearly in the mind before they 
assumed words and passed on from phrases to reality. 
In such a sequence the function of Robespierre was clear 
and his position at once enhanced and defined. He did 
not rise above the obscurity of the first sessions, nor did 
he outdistance as yet any of the lesser competitors for 
popularity and fame; the medium of clamour was still 
uncongenial to his destiny and temper. But it will often 
be observed in the working of deliberative assemblies 
that with the entry of a special point into the discussion 
an unknown authority is revealed. He may carry but 
little weight, yet he cannot but be heard since he has the 
matter by heart and is ready upon every turn of argu- 
ment; in spite of ridicule and indifference his name 



VERSAILLES 87 

cannot fail to pierce if only by the frequency of its 
repetition. Here the matter of debate was the new 
theory of society, and in that Kobespierre, full of con- 
nected dogmas, was a specialist in the extreme. The 
memory of Rousseau presided always in that hall, and 
here a kind of shrivelled Rousseau, desiccate and incap- 
able of development, but built of the elements of the 
Rousseauan Book, appeared with a living voice. 

There were present in France during the height of 
that summer, through its failing harvest, and with the 
turn of autumn when the vintage was ready, two great 
movements side by side. The first of these was an 
anarchy in the countrysides ; mere humanity going for- 
ward between the extinction of the old faint light and 
the rare dawn. The second was the mind moving over 
the face of such waters ; the Assembly, passing with the 
rapidity of pure thought from definition to organisation 
and casting decrees that only after years of warfare and 
the innumerable moulding accidents of a century of ex- 
perience have become the unquestioned laws of the 
modern state. 

Robespierre lived in this mind, hearing nothing of 
the loud storm in France, and heeding only the words of 
a debate ; but to appreciate at once his meagre quality 
of insistence, the temper of those to whom it was 
addressed, and the rising populace who later lifted him 
upon their shoulders, it is necessary to see the Parliament 
lit up by the burning of title-deeds and manors, chorused 
by the noise of the new district clubs in Paris, calling its 
orders over the roar of the furnace and doing everything 
to the rising and falling of flames. Into the picture of 
that conflagration, though it gave all its meaning to the 
time, I cannot enter ; it is the business of this book to 
examine not the Revolution, nor even the Parliaments, 
but a mind isolated and feeding inwardly upon itself. 
" ' ' It would be tedious and of little purpose to recount 



88 ROBESPIERRE 

every instance of his interference in the debates that 
affirmed the rights of the citizen, that laid the founda- 
tions of the Constitution and that destroyed the shell 
of the old regime. He combated Lally's vague and 
repressive motion of the 20th of July, proposed under 
the terror of the provincial riots ; he combated it again 
when on the 23 rd the Assembly passed it in the panic 
that followed the lynching of old Foulon in the Place 
de Greve. A month later he defended the four burghers 
of Marienburg whom Esterhazy had arrested of his own 
authority. Though his speech is lost he was one of 
the many who opposed the word " established " in con- 
nection with public worship in the Constitution. At 
the close of August he did two things very typical 
of his abstractions. First he defined a necessary liberty 
for the Press in terms that showed how completely the 
organic aspect of the State escaped him, and how 
thoroughly he was wrapped up in the conceptions of 
individual contract; for he proposed the abolition of 
all save private prosecution for libel. He saw that a 
citizen could have a claim ; he did not see how the 
more general evil of false news or of the corruption of 
morals by a press in the control of a few might prove the 
principal menace to the very form of society which the 
Revolution was launching upon Europe. Secondly, he 
wrangled hard for a word in connection with the right 
of the nation to tax itself, thinking that with the phrase, 
"consenting to the budget," all was lost, and with the 
phrase, " establishing the revenue," all was saved. Sup- 
ported by the bulk of the Left his first proposition passed ; 
his second helped to modify the cause in question. He 
was in all this but one amid innumerable speakers, but 
it is pertinent to know that at this moment, and in 
connection with the Press law, Mirabeau, who had 
watched and followed his action from the opening of 
the States- General, who was his colleague at the Breton 



VERSAILLES 89 

Club, and wlio had, presumably, put bim among the 
Deputies of the loth of July, came closely into touch 
with him and helped him into fame. 

It stood to reason that he would support his friend 
Lepelletier de St. Fargeau in his demand for an annual 
parliament, and that he would denounce as a monstrosity 
the royal power to veto a bill. There were occasions 
when the Assembly saw in him nothing but unreasonable 
logic incarnate, and refused to listen. Whether it was 
he who cried out " dues, not rights " during the " orgy " 
of the 4th of August when the nobles were throwing 
all their feudal privileges by the board, is not certain. 
But he spoke with an approach to violence when, six 
weeks later, the King hesitated to promulgate the aboli- 
tion of those privileges, and in the first days of October, 
just before Paris stormed the Court, he was still protest- 
ing against the continued reluctance which Louis showed 
in signing the Declaration of Rights. 

Thus whenever some obstacle appeared to the facile 
deductions of his politics, or some negation of their 
absolute verity was heard, he hurried to the Tribune. 
Thus, also, he was continually absent from it when the 
detailed work and curious interests of that prodigious 
Reform were the issue. To the end detail missed his 
mind and fact disturbed it. But there are three occa- 
sions very well worth observing, because they form an 
exception to his earlier and more natural conduct, and 
because they are the origins of that temptation which he 
was to feel towards the crowd; the first inconsistencies 
and the first taste of idolatry that warmed and enlarged 
whatsoever little in him could be enlarged or warmed. 
This temptation when he yielded to it was to make him 
more than a logician. It magnified his shadow till that 
shadow enveloped the multitudinous strength of Paris 
itself. 

The occasion of the first of these inconsistent de- 



90 ROBESPIERRE 

partures was when lie insisted on the right of search and 
on the opening of the private letters which Castelnau 
was caught bearing (ten days after the Bastille) from the 
Court to the King's emigrant brother. The Right quoted 
Pompey burning the letters to Sertorius ; and Robes- 
pierre, with an outburst half demagogic and certainly 
divorced from his native pedantry, thrust into his speech : 
" What care I for Caesar or Pompey ? " The second was 
his demand that poor Besenval, who had but obeyed his 
orders and taken command of the garrison of Paris be- 
fore the revolt, should be detained in spite of the muni- 
cipality's order for his enlargement. It is true he quoted 
legality, saying that the municipality was not there to 
arrest or to release ; they were not a court of justice. But 
his motive in speaking was not legality; it was that 
touch of the desire to lead and to appeal which was 
beginning to work in him. He saw a vision of the 
people moving. 

The third step in his original development forms so 
sharp a climax in the history of the Revolution and of 
his own life, that it merits an ampler attention. 

It was autumn. The feudal dues and the antique 
parochial government had gone ; they had not been re- 
placed. Forced labour had gone still earlier ; the roads 
lay unmended. The provincial tariffs were abolished in 
principle, they were thought abolished in fact ; this popular 
conception caused but longer wrangles and delays at 
the custom-houses of the provincial barriers. Anarchy 
multiplied that friction in exchange which had been the 
curse of the old regime ; the harvest, barely sufficient in 
amount, reaped by men uncertain of their market, dis- 
tributed over broken roads and open to the passing mobs 
of the Great Fear, failed the towns. 

To the fixed revolutionary purpose with which Paris 
had inflamed its soul there was added that great spur of 
the soul — hunger. The young men and women fasting 



VERSAILLES 91 

saw more than the lawyers knew; they saw the wide 
descent to '93, and bread and equality made a mixed 
desire. With the first days of October the mass of Paris 
was set in motion by the folly of the Court. The guards 
and the regiment of Flanders had sat at table on the 
stage of the theatre in the palace. The white cockade 
had been kissed and worn and baptized in the wine of 
two nights; and a noble song, a separate thing in the 
musical frivolity of the time, had touched that nerve of 
loyalty which is the life of soldiers. There were con- 
founded in this mad hope and in this chivalric treason, 
nobles merely selfish, the Queen merely Hapsburg, — 
perhaps also terrified for and determined on preserving 
the future power of her child ; regiments of the French 
blood, foreign mercenaries, and the King himself had con- 
sented. That it was an armed menace to the Assembly 
and hence to Paris and to the Revolution was not con- 
tested. Therefore the enthusiasm and high courage 
which marked the small garrison of the palace did but 
increase the anger of the nation and of the Parliament, 
for it gave to this forlorn hope an appearance of energy 
and of remote success. 

On Monday the 5 th of October a driving storm 
broke over Paris. Spontaneously, at the noise of a 
drum snatched up, the streets filled with women and 
a strength of four battalions, half an army corps, eight, 
ten thousand grotesquely armed, bareheaded, singing, 
pushed their faces against the wild rain and surged 
up the half-impassable valley road with a vague but 
terrible object in Versailles. Food, an equal right, the 
breaking of the foreign pride in arms, but, more than 
all, that great afilatus which makes of single souls in 
such moments the parts and organs of a whole people, 
pushed them on against the cold aud the intolerable 
gale. At their head, gaunt, dry- eyed and full of the 
future, Maillard went, black and leading. Behind them 



92 ROBESPIERRE 

followed a great host of struggling men dragging two 
guns by lanyards and hauling on to the same unknown. 
On the further side of the tempest they were marching 
to the Republic and the great wars. 

It was when the river had found an estuary and 
when this unnumbered energy had enlarged upon the con- 
vergence of the avenues in the great space before the 
palace that Maillard, organiser and voice, chose out 
twelve women and went into the hall of the Assembly. 
Outside the parliament house was a perpetual noise like 
the sea in easy weather ; the rain beat on their windows, 
the mob moved and circled with a continuous trampling 
and a general voice. Within there was the customary 
order, and, at the entry of Maillard and his twelve 
mothers, silence. 

Very tall, long-visaged, pale, all dressed in close 
black serge with no white at his wrists or neck, splashed 
with the mud of twelve violent miles and dripping with 
the storm, this executioner's figure looked with eyes 
over-bright at the Tribune from which there was expected 
freedom and sufficient food for men. He then saw there, 
short, contained, erect, the cold, small face, the neat and 
careful habit, the new expectancy of Robespierre, who 
answered the complaint of the hungry by demanding 
an inquiry, by confirming the popular dread of secret 
plots against the city, and who spoke in that extreme 
moment for the extreme men of his kind. They had 
been thought mere lawyers over-particular for exactitude, 
they were now discovered to be the only hand which the 
Parliament could reach out to the people. 

His voice, that had something in it hard and im- 
perfect, yet also was distinct, and in that moment he used 
the modulations which can play upon a phrase. His eyes, 
that were weak, found it possible in this high moment 
to be direct and unveiled. The little committee of the 
populace and their leader, older and more terrible by 



VERSAILLES 93 

many years than his own youth, heard delighted the 
enunciation of their own policy; they had received a 
vigorous support from the Left and had savoured the 
silent acquiescence of the great hall. They were con- 
ducted and went out in silence. 

Thus Robespierre first touched a thing that never 
wholly possessed him and yet changed his exact course, 
followed him in spite of himself and at last threw him 
down from a high false place : power. 

The days of October did not only bring him face to 
face for the first time with the people, nor did they 
only reveal to him and them for the first time the 
unconscious tribunate within him. They also dropped 
him, who had been lost on the periphery of Versailles, 
down into the centre of Paris. 

When the palace had been entered and when after 
the hungry night the violence of the morning had 
compelled the Court to follow down to the capital, the 
capture of the King whom the populace thus brought 
with them through the continuing rain was but a part of 
their achievement. They brought also the oratory and 
the metaphysics of the Assembly to the middle place 
where the history and therefore the stuff and power 
of France resided. The orators addressed an audience 
worthy of them, so that they caught substance from the 
complexity of the crowds; the metaphysicians found 
their formulae turned to a gospel, because the people are 
the makers of religion. Versailles stood upon a mono- 
tonous unfruitful century of splendour, symmetry and 
mechanical decay. It was a violent artifice run up by 
mere wealth suddenly in a forest. Paris was fifteen 
hundred years; a dense soil of dead things transformed 
and fermenting, an infinite potentiality of production. 
At Versailles there was not an inch of Gothic, a bare 
corner of the Renaissance ; very little even of that earnest, 
grotesque and learned seventeenth century, which is a 



94 ROBESPIERRE 

battlefield and is therefore alive. All in its architecture 
was the dead order of the younger Mansard and the 
official last of Gabriel, nor was there anything in harmony 
to respond to the enthusiasm of the attack or to the 
chivalry of the defence. But in Paris if the Assembly 
challenged the Christian hierarchy, Julian presided at 
the council ; if they looked for a civic defence Philip 
the Conqueror enrolled the bourgeois guard ; if the mob 
rose they were joined from all the narrow streets by the 
shadows of a hundred leaders ; if the nobility remembered 
at last that the sword made a difference, the eldest son 
of the Plantagenets stirred in the earth of Notre Dame. 

Paris was ready for the highest energies, straining 
like a runner at the crease, therefore when the few last 
days of lonely debate at Versailles were over and when 
the Assembly had met in the archbishop's palace on 
the Island of the Cite, waiting for the riding-school to 
be prepared, everything was ready for the ultimate entry 
of Danton, and the first stone of the Commune had 
been laid. 

It is evident that there was no immediate part for 
Robespierre in the new life that this meeting of the 
Parliament and the capital aroused, for he was not of the 
kind who renew their power from without, or in whom 
sudden accidents and friction light up genius. Never- 
theless, when he was given to Paris by the chance of 
October, a road was opened to him, for in Paris there 
awaited him a world that could comprehend him : in 
Versailles he had been utterly alone. 

Versailles had neglected and silenced a man suffi- 
ciently silenced and neglected by nature. He was a 
gentleman, and was seen in the drawing-rooms, especially 
in those of that half-noble set which played with theories. 
But save perhaps a note of decent ridicule, what could 
he add to them ? The rich, the world over, have one 
appetite, which is for the sensation of novelty. He 



VERSAILLES 95 

could give them nothing but phrases of which the very 
servants at their tables were tired. Perhaps, now and 
again the extravagance of his complete deductions might 
startle some one hearer into a momentary interest, but 
his conventional precision and all that rigid ill-ease 
which marks the self-respecting provincial was so much 
weight dragging him down into obscurity. There was 
no populace, no middle class, only the awful and repeated 
mediocrity of display, of superior mind and of patronage 
in the smart, the intellectual and the liberal aristocracy : 
three names for one thing. But in Paris, he that never 
breathed largely, at least could breathe. In Paris was a 
populace of whom he knew little, and who knew nothing 
of him, but who made him an idea because he made an 
idea of them ; and, above all, in Paris there was that 
professional middle class which was fitted with exacti- 
tude to his expression, which had awaited hungrily 
and which received with gratitude the tenacious re- 
petition of truth that was his special function. To 
one it was the pleasure of following out strict logic, to 
another it was the pleasure of hearing affirmed and de- 
fined what he had long held in the vague ; to all it was 
the acceptation of a well-comprehended equal whose very 
limitations were the virtues their rank admired. 

In Versailles it was a little ridiculous to lodge away 
down at the sign of the Fox, and to boast that four 
farmers sat at table with one. In Paris a man might 
lodge on the third floor of the Rue Saintonge, and have 
all the world asking him to dinner; it was but an ad- 
dress. The general life and the real interests of a capital 
released his pride from a daily fret, and left him free 
to his theories. 

The six months that follow the entry of the Assembly 
into Paris form a very natural division in the life of 
Robespierre and are, at least, sufficiently marked out in 
the general history of the Revolution to be treated as 



96 ROBESPIERRE 

a whole. The deputies met in the great Hall of the 
Archev^che on the 12 th of October 1789; at the close 
of March 1790 Robespierre was elected president of the 
Jacobins.^ 

With that word "Jacobins" the key to his career 
is in one's hand ; for just what he lacked, and would 
have continued to lack in the Parliament, that he found 
and increased in the famous society which seemed later 
half-identified with his name, and which gave him a 
hold over all France. If he was more mentioned in the 
papers, more recognised by the Court, and of some little 
more influence in the national debates, it was because he 
came to every effort with the armour that the Jacobins 
were forging for him; because, also, if he was checked 
(as he was for ever being checked), the Jacobins formed 
a base for him and a fortress of retreat. 
))( What was the nature of this society? How could 
it lend such power to a man ? Whence came the great 
rapidity of its growth, and why was it suited to him in 
especial ? It was the new theory organised like an army ; 
it was by its restricted room and numbers suited to an 
individual; it expanded later because it was the one 
mode in which the resistance of the people to reaction 
could mould itself throughout the country. It was not 
in the Assembly but in the club that Robespierre opened 
his door on fame, and if we are to know Robespierre, it 
is more important to comprehend this society than any 
other part of all that made up the Revolution, and though 
I leave an examination of its activity and character to a 
later chapter and to a period when it controlled France, 
I must here admit a note upon its origin. 

In some way, upon which authorities have differed, 

^ It is remarkable that in the "Histoire des Jacobins" this fact is 
omitted. Indeed, in the imperfect list of the first presidents of the club, 
M. Aulard, having drawn it up from signed documents only, leaves out 
the month of April 1790 altogether. The evidence of his presidency is 
contained in a third letter to Buissart — that of April i, 1790. 



VERSAILLES 97 

the Breton Club continued under another name when the 
Assembly was transferred to Paris. By one testimony ^ it 
appears in the Place des Victoires, by another it is directly 
transferred to the Rue St. Honord ; the general result is 
that the members of the Breton Club, sooner or later — 
probably in late November 1789^ — reunited in Paris. 
Wherever they may have fixed their first meetings, it is 
certain that by December 1789 they had hired the refec- 
tory of the old Jacobin convent in the Rue St. Honor^, 
at a rent of eight pounds a year.^ 

The Dominicans of the Rue St. Honor^, like their 
more important house in the University and like every 
religious establishment in the capital, were in active 
decay. Of their exact numbers I have been able to 
discover no record, but their chapter-house, their library 
was empty ; their walls ruinous. The Head received the 
radical club with enthusiasm ; it was upon his proposition 
that the monastery was opened to them and at his in- 
stance that the low rent was fixed ; the members of the 
House joined its sessions. In this broken and mouldering 
place, set back in its dark courtyard and, as it were, secret, 
the direction of the Revolution grew. From this it never 
departed till, in Thermidor, the Revolution itself may be 
said to have turned to decline. 

In these first months of its life the society, though 
already intense, was but little known. The public did 
not attend it. No reports were published. Its gatherings 
were small. We have hardly a record of it, save from 
half-a-dozen royalist attacks, and of the month of April 
which Robespierre presided only one quiet clerical debate 

^ Thus Montjoie, a singularly unreliable man, will have it that the club 
sat at 407 Place des Victoires, independently of the Jacobins for sometime 
after the formation of the latter. Revillieu Lepeaux will have it that 
there was no true continuity, &c. 

2 Mounier says " at the beginning of 1790." That can hardly be just, for 
De Lameth, an active member, recollected the admission of non-deputies 
in December 1789. 

* A. de Lameth, " Histoire de I'Assemblde Oonstituante," i. 442 (note). 

G 



98 ROBESPIERRE 

has come down to us : the proposal of a cure to rest con- 
tent with the advance reform had aheady made. Nor 
would even Robespierre's election to its presidency at this 
early date be worth mention were it not for the supreme 
influence which the club was destined to acquire. 

Paris, then, which gave him everything at last, was to 
give him, even as early as the spring of 1790, his first 
point of vantage in the chair of the Jacobins ; there he 
was to be heard by the numerous witnesses who, by 
the consistent policy of the club, included whatever in 
the professional and trading classes was liberal and 
distinguished. 

The first months of obscurity were over and the day 
was passed when (almost the last of his humiliations in 
the court town) his absurd formula for the signing of law, 
"Be this law sacred and inviolable for all," had called 
forth the wit of a Gascon, and when the repartee " No 
Anthems ! " had raised a great laugh all over the Assembly 
at Versailles. A month of Paris had destroyed for the 
wits the cultivated isolation in which such ridicule was a 
weapon. He could now continually propose a phrase or 
motion equally didactic; the Assembly would neglect to 
condemn it and the public would even applaud. 

I have no space to detail his speeches upon the decrees 
and laws that passed before the Assembly in that autumn 
and winter with the order and rapidity of a train of 
thought ; it must suffice to recall the principal occasions 
upon which he spoke and the tone of his interference. 
When, immediately after the arrival of the Assembly in 
Paris, the lynching of a baker at a stone's-throw from the 
Arch^v^che provoked the proposition of martial law, he, of 
course, denied its necessity under any circumstances what- 
soever. When in the next month it was discussed what 
classes of citizens might be excluded from full citizenship, 
he spoke, of course, for the actor, for the Protestant, and 
for the Jew, simply asking whether they were not men. 



VERSAILLES 99 

The Parliament, cautious and intent upon immediate 
applications, selected and postponed. The Protestant, 
appreciable in the nation, practically represented in the 
Assembly, was fused into the new state. For the Actor, 
what could be done ? A prejudice, still strong among 
Europeans, regarded the continual assumption of emo- 
tions always false and often evil, as a ruin to the character. 
No law debarred actors from civic privileges, how could a 
law restore their public standing? The Parliament masked 
the position with a resolution and passed on. As for the 
Jews, his arguments were of no avail. The Assembly 
adopted that theory by which they are regarded as a 
tolerated but alien colony, and gave them all the criminal 
and civil privileges but left them under all the political 
disabilities which such a definition involves. 

On two occasions Robespierre came down from these 
absolutes. Once when, like a lawyer, he spoke mildly of 
a partial revolt organised by the old provincial Parliament 
of Cambr^sis, and once when in the debate on the size of 
the new departmental bodies, he exposed in a really 
practical application the Rousseauan view of Assemblies. 
" If there are to be Assemblies, let them be large. A 
small one works too well." For he had here, as every- 
where, the weakening of arbitrary authority at heart and 
the uplifting of that right to self-government which 
resides in the individual ; a right that is easily deflected 
by too able a representative body. 

These debates, however, saw little of him and made 
no great mark. His defence of the Jews is forgotten, his 
pleading for the Protestants swallowed up in that of 
abler men ; what remains is the persistent attack which 
he led against the fixing of any but a universal suffrage. 
In this he very nearly appeared a leader, he was always 
well up in the front of the attack and even showed a 
kind of passion in his determination to oppose. It was 
the whole of himself, the root principle of all : — for if a 
L.of 0. 



loo ROBESPIERRE 

criterion of wealth or standing limited tlie civic right 
by ever so little, the Man was no longer the basis of 
the State, but there remained only property, or land, 
or letters, or some accident of the Man. From the first 
proposal in early October to the final decree at the 
close of January, he wore and broke himself against this 
barrier, the foreign theory of the Assembly that the 
privilege of representation was limited by the ability 
to pay taxes. That he had grown greater in the process 
is most apparent by the scene of the night of the final 
vote; the storm of the 23rd of January. 

He had so far lost hope that he recalled to his use 
his legal training and offered wise terms. " Let the 
Assembly suspend all action till the taxes were re- 
arranged. If a certain minimum of direct taxation were 
required to make a man a voter that would disfranchise 
nearly all his own people in the Artois. The land was 
largely on lease and the basis of taxation was narrow. 
He did not ask a final decision, he demanded only a 
suspension of the law until it should be made more clear 
that only the very indigent were included in the dis- 
franchised." 

What was there in this that provoked such scenes in 
the Manege ? The Right left their benches, and poured 
into the floor of the hall, the noise drowned all speech, 
and Robespierre was like a man standing under a steep 
wave of assault. Why ? Because his proposal hinted at 
the reversal of a decree, and the decrees of the Assembly 
were to be laws graven. 

This stands first in the political spirit of the time, 
that everything the Assembly did was thought to be 
done for ever. France, by an organic and spontaneous 
fusion which a mind foreign to the French has called 
" anarchy," was plastic for a moment ; it was the busi- 
ness of that moment to model, while it was yet plastic, 
what would so soon become a rigid society. The prin- 



VERSAILLES to I 

ciples, therefore, tliat underlay their eifort the Assembly 
feared to depart from, lest by too long discussion and 
the permission of too much vagary they should leave no 
completed work at the end of their short two years. 

Robespierre failed. The next day it was a law that 
the electorate should consist of those who paid at least 
some little tax ; that the elected must at least have 
some little fortune. Of the wisdom of this it is no part 
of my business to judge. The wisest, Mirabeau himself, 
feared the wayward indigence of the ruined towns and the 
dependence of the meaner peasants upon the seignorial 
power ; and among the historians, Michelet himself con- 
dones the fault. It affected the Revolution profoundly, 
for it exasperated the discontent of Paris of which 
Maillard was a hidden captain. It prevented the legal- 
ity of what was there fated to rise, and made of the 
egalitarian conclusions that were in the blood of the 
Revolution and that could not but become its open 
principles, a philosophy in revolt. 

The two months that followed had less of his effort 
in them than the character of their debates might have 
warranted. They turned so largely upon judicial matters 
that he, a competent authority, should have played a 
greater part in them. But his reputation was no 
-longer for these things, and it was in the character of 
Robespierre to note his own reflection in the popular 
mind. When a renewed incendiarism destroyed the 
country houses, he was still vigorously opposing martial 
law, and clinging with a false pedantry to his phrases. 
He used in a speech the legal jargon of a lawyer and 
spoke of " arson." A deputy of the Right became a little 
angry and cried, " Call them brigands." " I will call them 
citizens accused of arson." " Oh ! call them brigands 
and have done with it." " I will confine myself to the 
exact truth and call them citizens accused hut not yet 
proved guilty of arson." That interlude shows one all 



I02 ROBESPIERRE 

his thinness in the debates of the late winter. But 
this exact and unreal method raised him, for it was 
the principal contrast to the old regime and showed, 
alive, the new Reason on which men feasted. He did 
indeed stand apart in a memorable way in the debate 
on the monastic orders, but this, which was the origin 
of a whole attitude towards the clergy, I describe later. 
It must suffice here to insist upon the theoretic character 
of all he said throughout February and March. 

Such an attitude was meant for the Jacobins, and 
very steadily, without intrigue, he was made prominent 
by their temper. So at the end of March they elected 
him to the chair. He was not yet the first nor near 
the first. Barnave was their orator, Duport their 
head, Mirabeau their attendant. But he had been re- 
cognised. His special fitness for the management of 
debate, his quasi-official quality, had obtained an oppor- 
tunity. Neither he nor those who saw him there forgot 
its exercise. This little thing, the choosing of the 
extremist for a minor honour, was almost the last act 
of the united reformers. With April a man of acute 
observation would have seen the first appearance of two 
resistances that were to split the State ; the real power of 
the King, the postulates of the Church. These wedges 
had by the summer made wide clefts, within a twelve- 
month they had turned the Revolution from prose to 
vision; at last they brought forth '93 and there was 
nothing but war. 

• •••••• 

Such was the uneventful process of his entry into the 
politics of his country. It was a year since he had left 
Arras for the Parliament. 



CHAPTER IT 

PARIS 

Since I am unravelling in tliis book the track of an 
individual and solitary mind, I discover myself to be 
perpetually neglecting the medium in which that mind 
acted, the medium which it so strangely neglected, and 
yet which chose to exalt it utterly beyond its due. I am 
neglecting the Revolution. 

It is impossible rather than difficult to combine that 
mind with those surroundings. The main fact which 
has impressed itself upon me, as I have learnt more 
and more of what Robespierre might be — the contrast 
and dissociation between himself and the time that 
deified him — forbids any just weaving of such separate 
textures. ; I have shown him a nonentity ; I am about 
to show him a laborious aspirant ; I shall show him in 
the end a symbol, and at last a victim to his own mis-T 
understanding of the illusion that made him a chief. | 
Yet that would be no story of himself which did not 
pause here and there to consider the prodigious changes 
in the landscape through which — blinded by a distant, 
unapproachable, and perhaps imaginary goal — he was 
passing. 

The world he had entered in May 1789 was full of 
a great, vague, gentlemanly hope, but it was strictly con- 
fined to the traditions of its ancestry. It could think 
only in terms of its decadence. Its physical metaphors, 
its immediate appreciation of things, were drawn from a 
dying society. In ten months something — I will attempt 

its outline, but none can pretend to its full presentment 

103 



104 ROBESPIERRE 

— had brouglifc forth new terms, new postulates, even new 
physical details in the habitual experience of the mind. 
A tide set contrary to the common sequence of change: 
men thought, as it were, in the future ; their memories 
were warped or transfigured by the expectation of that 
which they were making, as, in more ordinary times, 
our picture of what we are making is warped or trans- 
figured by the colour of our memories. Whence came 
that more than natural impulse ? From without ; for 
it is not in men to think beyond themselves. From 
what outer region did it come ? I will hazard the reply 
that the energy and self-development of that high moment 
came from the infinite past of which we, each of us, bear, 
more tenuous but far less mortal than our troubled selves, 
the living ghost. The tribe was awake ; the village ; 
the clan marching in the hills. The man that had made 
the world was asking himself again those prodigious ques- 
tions which once, in his beginnings, he had answered with 
immediate simplicity : he had slept and was refreshed, 
therefore he attacked their solution with a morning 
vigour ; but he had slept and had forgotten and his lair 
had grown tangled in his sleep. How was it no one 
asked him counsel on the wars ? Who was this he was 
obeying ? Where was the common sanction and the sign 
of the chief? How was this, that he was tried and con- 
demned by some foreign influence, and why did he tremble 
before strange judges ? Where were his neighbours that 
had the sole right to judge a man ? How came he to 
be without land or arms ? Where was God ? He had 
slept in complexity, and complexity had stifled his sleep. 
But for all the tortuous errors and overgrowths of 
time there is a remedy, and that remedy is the blood in 
us ; the fields and the rivers. The old thing out of which 
we draw (what they used to call the Mother of the Gods) is 
simple and resolves all things backward into simplicity 
it never dies in the souls of men. Therefore when once 



PARIS 105 

in a thousand years accumulated evil by some quick acci- 
dent arouses nature, all the state grows young and is ready 
to combat — a new religion leaps out like a sword. Its 
unity and simplicity are keen like the edges of a sword. 
It cuts off the bonds of men so that they wonder how 
bonds were ever laid on them. In these moments it is 
easy to rebuild a world : and then time comes in again to 
corrupt, and corruption awaits another resurrection. 

All this (which is Nature herself in whom we repose) 
ran up the central life of the Revolution and drove it. 
Its rhetoric would seem meaningless or puerile, its 
exaggerations grotesque, had there not been left the 
Poets whose function it is to reconcile with our sober 
admiration and with the vast self-sufficiency of normal 
times those fantastic strainings out to the things beyond 
the world. Among these, two of the greatest, Shelley 
and Hugo, have caught the union of that effort with 
the fruitful seasons, mingling the Revolution and the 
winds in the noise of united verses ; making '93 a storm 
of rain before harvest. 

Now this character of the Revolution, by which it 
could create as though from a void, had in a summer 
and a winter passed, as it were, through generations of 
development. All the new things for whose secure 
establishment we should of right demand a long space 
of time and the opportunity for a slow forgetfulness, 
here stood out fresh, untrammelled by memories. For 
it was in the nature of this crisis that the immediate 
past fell out of sight altogether. There stood between 
'89 and '90 the strange barrier between sleep and waking ; 
and the Assembly in Paris in the second spring took up 
the thread of immemorial rights, left vaguely unremem- 
bered the motives of the last generations, precisely as 
a man waking recovers his identity of yesterday and 
leaves to an instantaneous dissolution the thin dreams 
of the night. Whatever in dreams is awful or confused 



io6 ROBESPIERRE 

or madly inconsequent, and whatever in tliem provokes 
their flight back into nothingness, that quality attached, 
in the mind of 1790, to the old disorder. It is a 
prodigy whose appearance in history is too rare for an 
exact comprehension. I know no metaphor to present 
it save that which I have used. ' 

It was in May that these six hundred Commons had 
met all dressed in the order of their rank and doubtful 
on particulars of pride. What had happened in eleven 
months when with April a new spring brought in the open 
road for Paris and for Robespierre ? In that past May the _ 
provinces, jealous, lethargic, wrapped in a ragged heraldry 
of centuries,-*^ sent up their anarchic complaints from their 
ill-attested census and doubtful boundaries : in this April 
France seemed over-clearly mapped into the exact de- 
partments, oppressed with statistics, ranged like a model. 
In that May a confused and interwoven tapestry of ranks 
and privileges, real in the mind of each however unreal in 
the eye of government, were the whole texture of society : 
in this April their very names had almost passed out of 
debate or argument. In that May — a thing to us in this 
country and at this time impossible to seize — all the 
nerves of power ran up and met under a strict and 
corrupt court, or, in the strained tangle of the old regime, 
broke somewhere on the road and left the executive 
paralysed : in this April there was hardly left one power 
that in law could clash with another, nor any part 
absolute in the State, but all its functions were co-ordinate 
and their mutual reactions defined. The long agony of 
the land, the death of feudahsm ; the abrupt decline of 
monasticism, its exhaustion and silence; the arbitrary 
courts, half living and half dead under the weight of 
custom and of the unquestioned, distant crown ; the 

1 For instance, Beam refusing deputies; sending them only in 
August 1789: insisting that no customs should be changed. By March 
1790 it was quietly become " the department of the lower Pyrenees." 



PARIS 107 

hundreds of dark uncomprehended titles, the " Consuls " 
of the South; the corporations, the privileges, all had 
wreathed up suddenly and gone. The void was filled. 
Upon all those new arrangements that seem to us to 
bear too sharp a mark of rigidity there was then cast 
not the softness but certainly the colour of youth, and 
the palace rose to music, and if the light was hard it was 
hard with the hardness of morning. 

Amid such origins the presence of Robespierre took 
on something established and permanent ; the standard 
by which he would have remade all the State was 
common to the mass of men about him, but he repeated 
its formula and applied its test with a regularity and 
consistency that were not yet grown wearisome and that 
even seemed like safeguards amid so much perplexity. 
For with the new society which the opening season of 
1790 proclaimed, the first reactions also, the first 
resistances and the first menace of confusion ap- 
peared. 

For the moment he gauged with extreme accuracy 
every element in his position — or rather his open and 
reiterated catechism of reform fitted exactly the con- 
victions of his neighbours. Thus he slid, as it were, 
from the Provincial to the Parisian. In his quarrel with 
Beaumetz^ he insisted upon a fiscal change in the 
Artois, upon direct taxation, that burden most odious to 
peasants, in order to qualify his reluctant Artesians for the 
vote, that privilege most desired of the political crowds 
in the capital. Again, when Desmoulins praised him. in^ 

* Beaumetz was a noble, head of the council of the Artois, and a 
colleague and opponent of Eobespierre's in the States-General. When 
the suffrage was limited to taxpayers, Kobespierre pointed out that the 
form of tenure in his province would disfranchise the majority of farmers : 
true to his principles, he proposed to impose a direct tax in order to in- 
clude them among active citizens. It may be imagined with what eager- 
ness Beaumetz seized upon the occasion to attack. Eobespierre's reply is 
contained in a rare pamphlet, published by Pettier, of Lille. 



io8 ROBESPIERRE 

his paper for having half- insulted the Court,^ Robespierre 
at once and vigorously denied the words ascribed to him. 
He was indeed, after another year of steady advance, to 
become the voice against the Crown, but he achieved 
that fame by no human excess of language ; he kept 
consistently to his formula? ; he worked not against the 
character and person, but against the glamour and tradi- 
tion of the King; he escaped the charge of demagogy, 
yet he undermined the base of the royal power. To 
speak constantly of " the executive," to call the King 
" the salaried agent of the nation," ^ to urge, and to help 
in passing, the resolution that forbade him to declare 
war/ were the expressions of a political attitude. There 
was throughout his political activity at this moment a char- 
acter of careful and continuous effort that closely resembled 
the legal work at Arras : he put into his daily speeches 
in the Manage, and into his nightly repetitions of them 
at the Jacobins, the regular assiduity of a country prac- 
tice, filling up his hours as punctually and methodically 
as he had filled them in the bare room of the Rue des 
Rapporteurs. Though he spoke almost daily, and some- 
times at a prodigious length, yet every speech was 
written out in that small, cramped hand of his, covered 
with erasures and re-erasures, laboured with a pedantic 
nervousness in the choice of words. These reams of 
manuscript, read out through spectacles, scheduled,* 
annotated, the occupation of unvarying mornings, are 
the chief witness to the nature of his success. In '89, 

1 Calling the Dauphin "Marmot." See Rdvolutions de France et de 
Brabant, No. 28. 

2 It was on the 17th May that he called the King " Premier Commis 
de la Nation " — a phrase the Assembly shouted down. 

* So I call for shortness the refusal of the Assembly to give in to 
Mirabeau, and to let the King have the initiative in the declaration of 
war (22nd May). 

* Consider this contrast. Not a note of Danton's remains. England, 
France, Germany, even America contain everywhere, in private and public 
collections, the MSS. of Robespierre. 



PARIS 109 

at Versailles, very little regarded ; in the winter and 
spring of '90 familiar at last to the small group of 
Jacobins, and already a target for the conservative 
pamphlets, his progression through the summer depends 
upon and is explained by this unwearying industry. If 
the word can be used of a mind and body so acute, he 
plodded. 

What, then, was the ultimate nature of his renown 
when, with the end of the summer, he had risen into 
the first rank ? Why, that he had come to stand for 
a fixed mark, for the certain repetition of what nearly 
all men held to be the prime theory of government. 
You bought your BSvolutions de Paris; you read regu- 
larly your Moniteur, your Patriote Frangais, your Ami du 
Peuple, even your Actes des Aijotres ; and daily you found 
Robespierre attacked when you would have been attacked, 
praised for what you wished to see praised, printing what 
you wished to see printed and firm. The image was 
colourless, and the more enduring for its lack of colour. 
It was fixed in the public mind as popular arithmetical 
rules are fixed in it ; repetition, unquestioning acceptance, 
the test of repeated applications, affirmed it. Men knew 
that they themselves were at once passionate and tempted ; 
they saw their own foibles reflected even in the grandeur 
of others. This compromise, that angry cry, another's 
friendships were suspicious from their very emotion; 
they betrayed politicians like you or me, too violent for 
judgment, perhaps, or perhaps bribed by the Court, or 
perhaps using the Revolution as a means to power. With 
Robespierre — a stencil, a fixed outline — there could be 
no danger of such vagaries. That he was mechanical, 
uncreative, was the condition of his eminence.^ He was 

^ Here is one instance out of hundreds of the way he could say just 
the commonplace thing that the public desired to hear. When a certain 
number of Americans (and the Americans served as a model for the earlier 
Kevolution) presented themselves at the bar of the Assembly with one 
Paul Jones at their head, and begged to join in the first feast of the 



no ROBESPIERRE 

like a seal of metal with wliicli Paris could be sure of 
registering its official words. 

One principal matter occupies the history of 1790 — 
the Civil Constitution of the clergy. From this the grave 
disorders of '91, the tragedies of '92 were to proceed. 
The attitude of Robespierre throughout the debates was 
the first revelation of his method, showed him as the 
secure interpreter of the people. Foolishly logical in the 
application of principles, he became a mouthpiece of the 
theories, but all the while he was conscious of how little 
the general instinct of France would as yet permit a 
thorough policy of attack. He covered the retreat of 
the priests, holding a careful balance when all the rest of 
the Left was for soundmg a charge. This double attitude 
of his proceeded from no intrigue : his power of political 
calculation did not appear till much later in the Revolu- 
tion. It proceeded from the exact consonance of his mind 
with the Rousseauan model, and with the spirit of the city 
in the centre of which he acted. His instincts, that ran to 
dogma, to the necessity of religion in the State, and to a 
hatred of the Voltairean negation, preserved him from 
a thousand enmities, and put into his hands what was 
to be, two years later, another thread of power — the 
tradition of protecting Catholicism. 

Before I deal with the speeches and votes in which 
he defined his relations to the Church, I would give some 
picture of the enormous blunder which the Assembly was 
about to commit. 

Great social forces drive themselves out of their own 
channel ; they undermine their banks. The renewal of 
France imperilled all the future of its work by leaving 
to one side — all France had so left it — a principal 
tradition bound up with the national existence. The 

Federation in July, the Speaker (thinking the episode insignificant) 
thanked them in a few careless words. Robespierre, full of the memory 
of Franklin, demanded and obtained the printing and official distribu- 
tion of their address. 



PARIS III 

Catholic Churcli holds in the fabric of that country a 
place so intimate that it is sometimes a question for the 
curious how far the religion of the Roman Empire has 
moulded Gaul, and how far the Gallic spirit may be 
made to account for the character of Western worship. 

Consider France. The conversion of the West was 
not complete, the sixth and seventh centuries were 
planting Christianity in the remoter hills, when the 
vague territory which still clung to the memories of 
a united province assumed the principal role in 
history. The Iberian peninsula was lost, the Italian was 
overshadowed by Byzantium, the British islands were 
barbarous, and Germany was but a narrow frontier 
march of combats when the transformation of our 
society was working in the " Terra Major," When the 
seal of Charlemagne was set upon the charter of civihsa- 
tion — the last testament of Rome, and the original 
statute of the middle ages — it was from Gaul that his 
imperial power proceeded. There were his armies re- 
cruited, thence they set out for their ceaseless marches, 
passing, as to an exterior conquest, Roncesvalles, Mau- 
rienne, the Rhine ; and the fringes of his kingdom closed 
round the solid quadrilateral of France. As her ver- 
nacular arose it was a medium for the first epics of 
Christendom ; in it was propagated the reform of Hilde- 
brand; and when the work of the Normans was accom- 
plished, the sermon preached at Clermont extended it 
throughout the world. It was the tongue of an armed 
nobility from the Tyne to the Euphrates; at last a 
Courtenay spoke it from the throne of Constantinople. 
In Paris, at the Jacobins of the southern gate, the School 
was defined; there Aquinas lectured and there the 
Summa was conceived. On this soil the universities 
arose; the typical kingship of the Most Christian King 
ruled it orderly when the Reconquista still made Spain 
a battlefield, when England was a feudal revolt, when 



112 ROBESPIERRE 

tlie Germans were bewildered in the meshes of Italy ; nor 
was it till the approach of the Schism that rent our 
Europe and thrust Catholicism inward to its centre, that 
the establishment of new nationalities and the confirma- 
tion of new literatures diminished this ancient hegemony. 
For the thousand years during which our race and its 
religion were kneaded, the French and the Church were 
one body. 

All this the French had forgotten, and under the 
pressure of the Revolution the nation attempted to enter 
a channel exterior to the main watershed of its history. 
The narrow class which alone remained articulate at the 
close of the eighteenth century were absorbed in a philo- 
sophy so rarefied that the stuff of Christianity seemed to 
it dross and meaningless. The clergy had suffered the 
infection, ritual had degenerated to phrase, the typical 
architecture of northern faith was left in ruins,-^ the life 
of the religion was obscured. The great places of the 
Church were filled without a thought of decency by men 
whom a clique of favourites might choose ; ^ so ingrained 
was the corruption that Louis XVI., devout and simple, 
continued in its tradition as naturally as in the etiquette 
of his Court. Even after the Restoration and on into our 
own time, something political marred and cast suspicion 
upon the clerics of the reaction, till Lacordaire founded the 
great work which is but now beginning to prove its vigour. 
In the Revolution only the poor and the remote preserved 
the germs of Catholic vitality — to the Assembly and 

^ Not only had they ceased to build the Gothic, they had utterly 
ceased even to understand it. I have seen, in connection with the writing 
of an essay on Paris, some hundreds of prints of the eighteenth century, 
representing the churches of the city. Not one of them has reproduced 
the detail of the Gothic or caught its spirit, and what is perhaps more 
remarkable, there is not one true reproduction of the facade of Notre 
Dame. 

'^ Thus in Kobespierre's own town of Arras, that great Abbey of 
St. Waast which dominated it was given to Cardinal de Rohan, the man 
of the Diamond Necklace. 



PARIS 113 

Paris they were unknown, and such defence as the 
Church could find had to be left to men like Maury, a 
dissolute, loud, political priest, destined to intrigue, to 
survive into the corruption of the Kestoration, to snatch 
a cardinal's hat, and to die somewhere half-starved and 
unremembered.^ 

In February 1790 monasticism had passed almost 
without a protest.2 In June was perfected the scheme 
by which it was imagined that the clergy could be ab- 
sorbed into the State, and Catholicism dead be wrapped in 
the winding-sheet of a civil administration. That error 
provoked the whole crisis of '90-91 ; round the resist- 
ance of the hierarchy may be grouped all that reaction 
which was the mark of the autumn, the winter and the 
following spring ; all that fury and exaltation which the 
reaction in its turn excited among the liberals. Of that 
spirit, the Crown, the nobility, the army — all the conser- 
vative forces of the nation — took advantage. Their com- 
bined attack upon the Kevolution must not be taken as 
being the strong thing it seems : it would have had no 
basis but for the seething of the country-sides, the angers 
of provincial religion, and the priests determining on a 
civil war. 

Of the disendowment of the Church no mention has 

^ Maury's life was a full commentary on the cause of which he made 
himself the spokesman ; a little picture of the old corruption. The son 
of a cobbler, he pushed himself into the Academy, and thence into the 
States-General : in '95 he was made a cardinal and nuncio at Frankfort 
— at last returning from his emigration to be Archbishop of Paris under 
Napoleon. After the Restoration he was driven out by his own chapter, 
achieved a final success by obtaining the Papal blessing, and died, a poor 
and abandoned adventurer, in 181 7, in a house of the Lazarists. 

2 Not abolished, of course, but its recognition by the State, its secular 
connection with officialdom dissolved ; and much the greater part of its 
property taken from it. It is astonishing how little resistance this decree 
provoked ; a proof of the utter degradation into which monasticism had 
fallen. No one feature of French life, with the possible exception of the 
village councils, was more revivified by the new freedom than this funda- 
mental institution of the Catholic Charch. 

H 



114 ROBESPIERRE 

been made, because it was not the true cause of the 
Schism. Proposed before the Assembly had left Ver- 
sailles, ratified immediately after its arrival in Paris, the 
confiscation of the corporate goods of the Church and 
the appointment of salaries for its hierarchy, had not a 
little attracted the starving clergy of forgotten villages, 
had broken the economic power of the great bishops, and 
had presented to the Revolution, in the immense landed 
estates of the dioceses, a security against the new currency 
whose issue was the most immediate of fiscal necessities. 
Nevertheless, that whole movement had in it a feature 
which foreign historians too frequently neglect, it worked 
of necessity against the grain of the country, it could 
never be perfectly executed, public action halted tardily, 
long behind the decrees. It was not till April that the 
first assignats were issued, it was not till a year later 
that the land upon whose value they were based began 
to sell with any readiness. 

To remedy a false situation and to solve, as it thought, 
the religious question upon the most reasonable lines, the 
Assembly, that had already heard the priests defined as 
"functionaries," proceeded to build up artificially and 
by rule a church of stone and iron to replace the 
living organism whose grave maladies they had mistaken 
for dissolution. It was proposed to assimilate the com- 
plex traditions of Catholicism, its hoary anomalies and 
its depths on depths of mystery with the plain new creed 
of the democratic bureaucracy. To every department a 
bishop — elected by the people ; to every commune a 
priest — elected by the people. The link with Rome was 
just preserved in an ofiicial announcement from each 
diocese as its see was filled. Dogma was left, by im- 
plication, to occasional Galilean councils. 

There is no marvel in the imposition of so extra- 
ordinary a mould upon the fabric of French religion. 
The whole mass of educated Frenchmen, I repeat, had 



PARIS 115 

in that last generation of the eighteenth century been 
cut off from religion. Never before, since his philo- 
sophers had surrounded Julian in his palace on the 
island, had Lutetia lost so much of her worship; never 
since in all the dogmatic negations of our century have 
the ruling intellects of France so thoroughly ignored the 
colour and kind of Christianity. Nor was this all : the 
Assembly had here and there among its most powerful 
and brilliant men, orators whom a special tradition urged 
against the Apostolic see : Camus, the last of the Jansen- 
ists, that would only speak of the " Bishop of Rome " ; 
Lanjuinais, the Canonist of Rennes, trained to defend in 
the courts of Brittany " the Galilean liberties " ; Rabaut 
St. Etienne, whose amiable round face concealed very 
bitter memories and who had been born, he did not him- 
self know where, the child of persecution. 

Treilhard's report upon the anarchy of the religious 
administration and the gross inequalities of the benefices 
was read on the 30th of May. De Boisgelin, the vigor- 
ous Archbishop of Aix, academician, poetaster, liberal, 
court preacher ^ rose to answer and struck the new note ; 
a creed as important as the creed of Rousseau was 
discovered to be alive and the Revolution had polarised 
upon two centres of attraction — hence was to spring the 
eivil war. 

" Jesus Christ sent out His apostles for the saving of 
souls. He gave that task neither to magistrates nor to 
kings. . . . You are urged to-day to suppress a portion 
of that ministry,^ to define its power, to arrange the 
limits of its jurisdiction. That power was founded 
and those limits set by the apostles. There is no human 
power that can touch or meddle with it of right. , . ." 

1 He fled later on to England, became a cardinal, re-entered with the 
Concordat and died at the age of seventy-two Archbishop of Tours in the 
year that Napoleon was crowned. Two things lay him under suspicion 
as a poet — he translated Ovid and arranged a metrical version of the 
Psalms. 

2 The Civil Constitution destroyed 51 out of 134 dioceses. 



n6 ROBESPIERRE 

The debates proceeded. On tlie morrow Robespierre 
read bis precise essay, wbicb, being an essay, be did not 
besitate to divide into tbree beads : tbat tbe number 
and functions of tbe clergy sbould be limited by tbeir 
direct use to society (be admitted and applauded tbat 
use); tbat tbey sbould be elected by tbe general voice; tbat 
tbey sbould be tbe salaried servants of tbe community. 
So far it was a feast of commonplaces and of agreement 
witb tbe committee tbat bad studied tbe question and 
framed tbe bill. But at tbe close of bis speecb be did 
something that indicated at once bis acute political 
touch and tbe compromise that be was determined to 
maintain between tbe Church and tbe new society. He 
knew that every one bad something in bis mind wbicb no 
one dared to mention — celibacy. 

Sbould the State ratify such marriages as these 
men, its new servants, might choose to contract ? It 
would seem in keeping with the Rights of Man. But 
then, if a priest married, could bis bishop drive him 
from bis cure ; could the Church forbid the exercise 
of his ministry ? If not, what power of interior dis- 
cipline bad the Church ? What remained of the con- 
tention that the civil constitution left her intact ? Here 
was a peculiar and sacred custom grown to be part and 
parcel of Latin Christianity — to touch it was to awaken 
witb a stroke of horror the dormant Catholicism of tbe 
nation, to neglect it was to deny in practice to a servant 
of the State one of the primary rights common to all 
citizens. 

In all impassable situations there is some such 
test matter which reveals the self-contradiction tbat 
marks a deadlock. When a man is prepared to dis- 
cover and present such a test question to a nervous 
assembly, he has given proof of leadership because be 
has shown political daring. This Robespierre knew. Tbe 
instinct in him to pubhsh himself continually, the desire 



PARIS 117 

to be heard first on a matter that could not but become 
of major interest, the exact appreciation he had of what 
the Assembly was, all appeared in the form he gave to 
his venture. He mixed hesitation into his advance. 

" I come now," he said, like any professor, " to another 
matter. It will be generally agreed that it might be 
well to bind every citizen as far as possible to 
society. . . ." One or two anxious men on the Right 
and a prelate or so smelt heresy and began to protest ; the 
Left applauded as though to a peroration . . . yet he had 
said nothing. He continued with extreme care, " I desire 
to say nothing that might offend common sense or even 
the public opinion of our time. . . ." The applause and 
the protests grew general. He looked round quietly, folded 
his manuscript and left the tribune. In this way did 
Robespierre deal with the celibacy of the clergy. He 
established the reputation of a pioneer, but he had used 
neither the word marriage nor the word priest, and he 
had escaped a battle royal.^ 

The debates proceeded. For days he spoke in each 
without advancing anything further than his original 
proposition and without departing from his original 
caution. On the 9 th of June he defended the popular 
election of bishops and used a phrase purely in the tradi- 
tion of Rousseau. " I recognise the grave inconveniences 
that attach to this method of choice, but when virtue is 
departed from most individuals you will find it in the 
corporate existence of the people. The clergy as a body 
were they to nominate the bishop could not but be 
sectional in spirit. I conclude on the whole for the 
people. . . ." 

When, on and after the i6th, the salaries of the 

^ Loustalot, in the 49th number of the Rdvolutions de Paris, proves 
at once the position these sentences acquired for Eobespierre and the 
monstrous untruths of which journalism can be guilty. He speaks of an 
address of thanks from " 500 priests of Picardy." He promises to publish 
their names, but he is not so foolish as to keep his promise. 



ii8 ROBESPIERRE 

clergy were discussed, his many speeches preserved the 
same attitude of repetition and of careful handling. He 
spoke, ^as he had spoken at Versailles, of " the poverty " 
that underlay the foundations of Christianity, he attacked 
the higher salaries proposed for the bishops, he left un- 
opposed the lower incomes of the parish clergy. To the 
first of these he returned with an approach to energy ; on 
the 22nd he rallied the new functionaries on their 
debts, asked them if they were ''condemned to receive 
twelve hundred a year." He spoke at some length and 
with fervour for the mass of the lower clergy. He closed 
the conflict by demanding on the 28th of June pensions 
for all aged priests, beneficed or non-beneficed. His 
words in this definite offer to a great group of opinion 
are worth a literal transcription. 

" I call only for a measure of justice. These men 
have grown old in the ministry, their labours can have 
brought them nothing but infirmity. They have some 
claim to your indulgence by their ecclesiastical title ; and 
by something more, by their necessity." ^ 

The Assembly refused his demand, but his defence was 
permanently remembered. Throughout the summer he 
emphasised his position. He defended in August a 
priest that had sheltered a conspirator; he lent the 
ecclesiastical profession a peculiar sanctity when he 
appealed against its admission to civil office; he is all 
for liberty in the debate on the Soutane, and when the 
constitution of the clergy had been voted — signed by the 
King and notified to Kome ; when, in October, the mass of 
the French Church had revolted in a famous protest and 
when these grumblings of active opposition were met by 
the decree enforcing on the priests an oath of loyalty to 
the Constitution — he stood aside. Amid all that in- 
cessant political movement of his there is one fortnight of 
silence. It is the fortnight in November when the angry 

^ Moniteur, 24th and 29th of June 1790. 



PARIS 119 

Assembly, seeing the confiscated Church lands hanging in 
the market and hearing the persistent cry from pulpit 
after pulpit for resistance, determined to coerce the 
Church, ordered the administration of the civic oath 
to the clergy and threatened to deprive all those who 
refused it. 

Time and a long sequence of political effect have 
proved to us the fundamental importance of the ecclesi- 
astical question in 1790. At the time it seemed but one 
of a hundred points in the triumph of a reasonable order. 
The passages I have quoted are evidence of Robespierre's 
method in debate, and of his advocacy of the clergy ; the 
whole attitude on which I have insisted helps to explain 
the future development of his power : the half-unwilling 
support which, during the Terror, the silent Right con- 
tinued to afford him. His way of dealing with the priests 
in 1790 laid the strongest foundations of his success and 
reveals his inner sentiment most clearly. Nevertheless, 
it was almost unheeded by the radicals. The Robespierre 
whom the professional classes of the capital had begun to 
regard as their epitome and whom chance hundreds 
already addressed from every part of France was to them 
the " unflinching tribune " ; the bulwark against com- 
promise and to reaction. 

It was he that stood against Mirabeau in the vio- 
lent debate of the 27 th of July, when there was a 
question of canalising, as it were, the public fury 
against Conde,^ it was he that conquered in the division. 
When, on the 20th of June, all titles of nobility were 
abolished, it was he that was most particular to drop the 
" de " with ceremony. It was he that first did that ridi- 
culous thing and dragged out of their obscurity the 
forgotten family names of the nobles, calling Mirabeau 

^ For I take it to be certain that Mirabeau's special attack on Cond^ was 
but a feint to prevent a general attack on the Court and on the sympathy 
of the Court with the intrigues of the emigrants. 



I20 ROBESPIERRE 

" Riquetti," Lafayette "Mottier." To tlie crowd sucli puer- 
ilities seemed so many acts of faith, and he alone dared 
make them. It was he, again, that was for ever defending 
private soldiers and sailors against the rigour of the new 
code, that protested most energetically against the thanks 
that were voted to Bouill^ for the fierce repression whereby 
he had re-established discipline at Nancy. In every acci- 
dent that could bring the pure theory of the Revolution 
into conflict with realities or with calculated opposition it 
was his voice which was most demanded : he never failed 
to make it heard. He was already believed, at the ap- 
proach of autumn, to be the centre of resistance against the 
reaction that was rising as the clergy closed their ranks 
or as the irritation in the army developed and the foreign 
intrigue began to organise. He had become a personage 
with whom Mirabeau found it necessary to treat ; whom 
here and there throughout the territory other revolu- 
tionaries, destined to names as famous as his own, ad- 
dressed from the silence or confusion of their provinces. 

Among these letters was one which wove into his life 
and into the Revolution an episode of worship : a devotion 
that coloured the Terror and brought into the empty 
simplicity of Robespierre's own life the pomp of ardour. 
It was a message from St. Just. 

That boy — noble, disordered, of an extreme beauty, 
tall, graceful in gestures — matched his distinction with 
words that seemed found or chosen for his peculiar cast 
of body and of soul. His purpose, his enthusiastic courage, 
his sudden eloquence, were later to enter the Republic 
like a strain of fierce music. He surrounds the Robes- 
pierrean tradition as a frame half grotesque, half gorgeous 
may surround a hard, imperfect drawing; yet, incongruous 
as he was to the man whom he followed, he lends to 
this man's story a wild interest that preserves it. Once 
already St. Just had flashed into the Revolution when 
he burnt the pamphlets of the reaction in his southern 



PARIS 121 

village and swore to defend the new order, stretching out 
his hand over the flame in a pagan memory. The thea- 
trical in which that time abounded, the pedantic by which 
it was continually marred, became in him, by I know not 
what touch of brilliancy, the dramatic or the revelation of 
antiquity. 

He possessed also this supreme quality : that time and 
battles put ballast to his angers and his visions, that 
under strain he grew greater than himself. When he 
came to his end he had reached to the appreciation of 
ordered law and to the power of creating new things. 

The allegiance of this genius, the acceptation of his 
mission by such a mind, was a final mark of the stage 
Robespierre had reached in his advance. It christened 
him leader. 

With this assured success the summer drew into 
autumn ; with the autumn i a further development tided 
him on a further stretch ot his way. The Jacobins, the 
small half-secret place where he had gradually out- 
stripped Duport, the Lameths and Barnave, were the 
caucus whose leadership was to give him as an appanage 
the leadership of the whole Left, of the mountain and 
at last of the Republic. They had blossomed from a 
single stem into an undergrowth, multiplied and become 
a nation. This transformation was the work of the great 
Federation of July — the thousand towns that are like the 
pillars of France had touched through their delegates the 
direct issues of the struggle. The provincial Federations 
throughout the country had prepared a generous though 
a facile enthusiasm ; that enthusiasm had, during those 
few days of sheer light in July, discovered a material 
on which it could work ; it had felt the strengthening of 
the reaction, it had seen the enemy from beneath his 

^ Hamel speaks of this letter as "coming some time in the middle of 
August." It can only have come at the very end of the month, for 
it is dated the 19th, and could not have taken less than a week or 
ten days to reach Paris. 



122 ROBESPIERRE 

own walls, from the streets that surrounded the palace. 
Against this enemy the organisation — the inquisition — of 
the Jacobins of the Rue St. Honor^ was designed. The 
provincial Federations returned to their homes and set up 
everywhere a model of the central society. These, linked 
into a hard discipline with the mother house, receiving 
its orders, taking in light from it as from the eye of 
Paris, set up posts and beacons for the liberals : watch- 
towers of suspicion. Wherever the new municipal life 
had arisen in the vast awakened territory, this network 
of the clubs had its unit and agent : they garrisoned and 
organised France. The autumn made the Jacobins be- 
cause it made the reaction. The clergy in revolt pro- 
voked that other clergy who were devotees to the reform. 
Thus it was at the close of August that the King signed 
the Civil Constitution; at the close of October that De 
Boisgelin and the thirty bishops of the Assembly issued 
their " Exposition of Principle," at the close of November 
that the oath was insisted upon by the violent decree of 
the Assembly — from that date the stirring of the villages 
became a turmoil : the priests cried martyrdom. And 
side by side with the growth of this solid resistance, 
with the growth therefore of new hopes in the Court, 
in the foreign cabals, in the emigrants, went the increase 
of the Club, the watcher and jailer of the court and the 
foreigner. The membership of the Jacobins of Paris had 
in early '90 been but 400 — mostly drawn from the 
Assembly : it had risen with the late summer to over a 
thousand, mostly citizens. Opinion exterior to the Parlia- 
ment dominated it and chose the favourites. 

A week before the King consented in despair to 
sign the Civil Constitution of the Church, there were 
152 provincial clubs associated with the Club. A few 
weeks after the attempt to administer the oath had 
failed they had risen to 227, a month later to 343; 
yet a month later to 406 — half France. It had re- 



PARIS 123 

cognised its own immensity and power, liad drawn up 
its first lists/ had arranged its method of command 
when December called a kind of halt and left opposed 
the two forces : old France resurrected by the radicals' 
capital error, new France turned angry and ready for 
every suspicion, later for every violence, in defence of 
the liberty it had won. The deadlock in the organisa- 
tion of the new clergy, the refusal of the oath, the 
manifest sympathy for the priests felt by the thousands 
of little villages which the Revolution itself had rendered 
autonomous and whose freedom it dared not curb, the 
doubt as to what would be the action of Rome, the 
foreign intrigues turned back again underground — all 
these left action doubtful. 

The year 1791 was introduced therefore by a curious 
silence. The situation was like that which has appeared 
in certain battles : the ground is won, the general advance 
has been successfully made, but the enemy is known to 
be strongest in his last line. His retirement has but 
concentrated his resistance and the attack hesitates before 
the final blow. There has been neither rout nor capitu- 
lation — an open plain of dangerous width lies between 
the positioHS the advance has conquered and the last 
trenches of the defence. In such a crisis at the worst 
hesitation, at the best delay, seizes on the victorious 
army; its tension relaxes; the men talk to each other. 
So the Revolution hesitated and so before its final ad- 
vance the reaction gathered. 

The radicals turned in upon themselves, to dinners, 
evening arguments and confabulations, to concerting 
plans — even to domestic interests. The marriage of 
Desmoulins two days before the New Year is very typical 
of the time. The Left in unison seem to retire into 

^ The first list is that of December 1790. The material of this I have 
drawn from a speech of Desmoulins, from the preface of Aulard's 
Histoire des Jacobins, and (with some reserve) from Michelet's traditional 
account of the development of the club. 



124 ROBESPIERRE 

their homes ; they come to the marriage, doing honour 
to their pamphleteer. Brissot, Petion, Robespierre sign 
the register in the vestry; the priest, unconstitutional, 
of course — (Desmoulin's old head-master) — gives his 
paternal benediction to the love-match. It was as 
though men were saying, " Soon the supreme struggle 
will blind us ; let us go back and rest for a moment in 
the past." 

This lull seemed perhaps an opportunity to the 
failing grasp of a man who has appeared but fitfully 
in these pages of a single biography — who yet filled 
the time : Mirabeau. The decrees on the Civil Constitu- 
tion of the Clergy had passed ; the oath had been pre- 
sented and in the main refused/ but the Pope's brief 
had not yet fallen to decide an active struggle. 

Mirabeau caught the opportunity of the lull; he 
noticed death approaching ; he came up out of his degra- 
dation ; he took every advantage of the moment ; he 
intrigued and intrigued. But his intrigues were even 
at this time not mainly directed to the sustenance of 
the throne or to the establishment of that limited mon- 
archy and that English model which haunted his travelled 
experience — they were mainly directed to the warding 
off of foreign interference, to keeping high the stability 
and honour of the country abroad, to preventing the 
Court from looking beyond the frontiers. On either 
side he touched failure. His reports came almost un- 
heeded to the Court cabal that saw nothing in his 
genius but a useful trick wherewith to deceive the 
populace : his suspected acceptance of the King's money, 
his creed of compromise and balance roused against 

^ AH the bishops but four, and two-thirds of the priests refused 
the oath. So seriously was the farce taken that these four bishops were at 
the pains of having every canonical rule observed when they instituted 
their schismatic colleagues. Three of them were even at the pains of 
laying on hands, and the Galilean Church that lived two years was in 
possession of Apostolic orders. 



PARIS 125 

him in a final effort the anger of the Left and the 
political puritanism of the Jacobins. Duport, Barnave, 
the Lameths grew stronger and more bitter against him 
as he weakened ; it was apparent as the winter pro- 
ceeded that he must lose his hold. 

The last day of February, a date not often remem- 
bered, should form a landmark ; it was the beginning of 
Mirabeau's agony, and the end of his prodigious resistance. 
At the Jacobins that night a kind of storm broke over 
him ; the accumulated suspicion which had grown round 
his name, the accumulated effect of so many partial but in- 
creasing defeats in debate came then together and raged 
about him openly — Duport and Lameth blamed him 
almost by name, all the eyes of the long library turned on 
him, and every outburst of applause that met the denuncia- 
tion of compromise fell upon him like a shower of arrows. 
Many things that were to mark the later Revolution 
flared up under the lamps of that evening — the open 
quarrel with the Court, the abandonment of old leaders, 
the omnipotence of the Club, the schism that was 
to branch into further and further divisions till one 
small remnant, the Mountain, should alone be left 
for '93. 

Especially this appeared: the deliberate idolisation 
of the new names and the false worship of Robespierre. 
For the very action of Mirabeau's which the club was 
condemning, and which put the match to their indigna- 
tion, had been supported in the Parliament by Robes- 
pierre. He also had argued with a cold exactitude of 
principle, as had Mirabeau with a violent eloquence, to 
defeat the law against emigration ; and when the greater 
man, despairing of France, bent upon saving the Crown, 
had thundered out, " Silence, you thirty voices ! " he had 
seemed to draw the lesser man into the vortex of his energy, 
and to be making a protection for Robespierre against the 
interruptions of the Left. Robespierre, simply because 



126 ROBESPIERRE 

it seemed to him an inconsistency, refused to trammel 
liberty, even in order to check the tide of emigration. 

The Parliament in the morning had seen this, but the 
club in the evening would have nothing of the truth. It 
was entering t»he phase of enthusiasm where men see not 
what is, but what they will, and though Mirabeau quoted 
in his defence the agreement of Kobespierre, his argument 
went for nothing. The people had been up and out that 
day ; they had marched to Vincennes, had been checked 
by Lafayette— now definitely an enemy — had poured 
about the Tuileries, had challenged the defenders of the 
King. On such a day the extremists refused to remember 
anything in Robespierre but that he was their principle 
in the flesh. They mutinied against the man whose 
wisdom and whose affections, whose apprehension of what 
France was, but also whose debts and whose attachments 
of birth and habit, combined now to make him something 
separate from the reform. If both had defended the 
right of emigrants to pass the frontiers, the club was 
determined to find corruption in Mirabeau's defence, in 
Robespierre's an excess of zeal for liberty. 

It was with pathetic and sincere insistence that 
Mirabeau attempted a reply. The reply was listened to 
without murmurs, but without applause. The gist of it 
appeared in a phrase that came certainly from his large 
heart, his memories of leadership, and his appreciation of 
failure, and perhaps of disaster. " I shall always be one 
of you — even if it comes to exile." It was to come to 
the longest of exiles. 

He sat down, his vigour gone, the strong poise of his 
head abandoned, and in the powerful forwardness of his 
face a hollowness and a kind of resignation ; the falling 
of so much sustained and rebutting effort. His mastery 
was ended. Desmoulins, sitting not far off, and watching 
him closely as the club dissolved, wrote down this note : 
" He has passed into Olivet." ^ 

* M6v. de France et de Brabant, No. 67. 



PARIS 127 

For a month a kind of lull surrounded the departure 
of this great man. March was empty, hardly occupied 
by insignificant debate/ and by a coincidence common 
enough in the history of great movements, a shadow of 
silence passed backward out of what was to come. Mira- 
beau spoke less, demanded less ardently. A weight came 
on him and on France. His sleep left him, and his 
strength. With the end of the month he died proudly, 
and, as long as his eyes could follow life and the sun, they 
were fixed upon the Crown he had attempted to save. 

It has been said that Mirabeau dying left the world 
empty for Robespierre to fill. The phrase is exaggerated 
and false. We now, who can tell what Robespierre was 
to become, see in it an element of truth. For that time, 
and for the appreciation of the exact course which fame 
took with Robespierre, it has not even such an element. 
The effect of Mirabeau's death upon the career of Robes- 
pierre was negative and tardy ; an artist had disappeared, 
and round his death-bed there gathered a sunset in 
whose glow was lost the effect of lesser reputations, 
and only on the diffusion of which it could be discovered 
that one man especially remained to stamp by reitera- 
tion upon the public a name rather than a character. 
This is much truer, that since things lost are replaced 
by things of their own kind, Mirabeau dying left France 
in heritage or as a ward to Danton. But this is truer 
still, that when Mirabeau was dead, one great, hidden, 
suspected, unmentioned verity was released into the day- 
light ; the King was afraid of himself. 

What had passed in that soul ? History has never 
solved the problem, and never will, because he could 
barely speak or write or express, though he was of the 
first importance in France. Louis was Catholic, he was 
sincere, he was (so far as political terms may be used of 

^ For instance, there was nothing of Eobespierre's but the defence of 
an obscure priest. 



128 ROBESPIERRE 

character) a liberal ; lie was French and he was patriotic ; 
he could love a little and was very firm upon the loves 
he comprehended. He may be said with justice never 
to have betrayed the Church, and never to have signed 
a decree that seemed to him enormous or essentially 
inimical to society. But there ran in him a something 
very mysterious, which one of the fatal short cuts of 
history has chosen to describe as weakness. If it was 
weakness, it was a weakness like a muscular weakness 
of the heart, or like a nervous fault, something extra- 
neous to his general self; something that made him — a 
man not without firmness, and, alas ! not without ruse — 
suddenly stupid at moments, and in a crisis utterly at sea. 

The Revolution is still near to us, it reveals itself 
partially by documents and more by its political effects. 
The personality of Mirabeau grows out of it on the dis- 
tance, as the Alps grow out of the summer plains when 
a man follows the shallow Durance downwards to the 
Rhone, and sees at last the majesty of the hills he came 
from. Assuredly the more the Revolution is studied the 
more will it be seen that the Court leant heavily upon 
Mirabeau. The staff broke in death. There remained 
in the noisy palace that had still so great a power no 
principle of support. 

There remained the Queen, who but for her disdain 
and birth might now merit the description of petulant ; 
there remained the ruck of sword-men, mostly noble, the 
dregs that incapacity had left stranded even in that 
springtide of opportunity ; and there remained the virtue 
of a few good women who knew less of the world than 
children do. Lastly, by an irony of kingship, the very 
theory of the Court, in its domestic ordering, gave the 
King the principal power. And the King was afraid. . A 
mob had been to him from the first days of '89 what 
breakers are beneath to a man unused to boats, or a 
horse beneath a man that cannot ride. 



PARIS 129 

Mobs were very little in tlie Revolution. The more 
the people were determined, and the more they achieved, 
the less of the mob was there in their arrangement : for a 
mob is the people powerless. But what there had been 
of them — especially the roaring irruption of October — • 
had left the King suddenly without bearings. This fear 
determined his inconsistencies, or, at least, if not this, 
then nothing can explain them. His firmness, his 
natural piety, his pride (which was not small) left him 
when he saw humanity enormous and disorganised ; he 
was more afraid of it than are even landsmen of the 
sea. 

To this weakness, emphasised as it was by the hun- 
dred separate misconceptions of France that haunted his 
wife, his friends, his confessor, his guards, the puissant 
and manifold spirit of Mirabeau had stood corrective. 
Such a man, with the vices or necessities of large desires, 
with the comprehension or compromise of wide vision, 
filled up, supplemented, the inequalities and emptiness 
of the palace. There was nothing about him single or 
direct enough to parry the just accusation t' at followed 
him ; he had need of the Court, or at the ' best he had 
affection for it; from one time to another the colour or 
the pressure of the world allured or drove him away 
from principle ; he had received a pension ; he had 
weighed the dead France against the living and he had 
hesitated very much at the sharp solutions that drive 
through the complexity of existing culture, tearing (as 
he feared) the web of society. But this man to whom 
a mixture of wisdom, energy, and physical foible, had 
combined to give statesmanship, conquest, temptation, 
and something of incertitude or prudence — this man had 
been the very medicine of the Court. Every power in him 
was what the Court had lacked, every wistfulness in him 
for justice helped him to link the Court up with the 
Reform and to preserve it in spite of itself. Above all, 

I 



130 ROBESPIERRE 

his grasp of reality held united from either side the 
formulse of the conquering Left and the empty echoes of 
a dying ceremonial. This bond and support was gone. 

By a wretched coincidence Louis was to experience, 
within a few days of that loss, just such an accident as 
most bewildered him. Mirabeau died upon the 2nd of 
April. Upon the 1 8 th the King blundered in public. 

It would be foolish to read into the i8th of April 
more than exactly happened. Certainly it was not 
religious scruple that drove the King to leave his 
palace to make his Easter communion at St. Cloud. 
His communion would have been valid enough at the 
hands of any chance priest. By one account^ he had 
already communicated in the palace. Almost as cer- 
tainly it was no definite plan to fly the city. He 
would not have fled thus through the streets in state and 
with good warning. It was a desire to find air and room, 
to be himself, to show how much remained to him and 
to re-enter his own personality (with which every habit 
of kingship was involved) that led him to St. Cloud. 
St. Cloud was his favourite sojourn and his habit for that 
time of the year; he knew he risked a little in the 
proposal, he delighted in the prospect of success over 
that little risk. The result was overwhelming : the 
streets, full of an intricate mixture of protesting citizens 
and revolted militia, the vain efforts of Lafayette, the 
mob, not dangerous nor inspired by a special hatred 
but still the mob, barred up his passage. His coach 
swung there three hours on its high great springs : his 
own face looked out blameless and alarmed over in- 
numerable faces. At last he despaired. He re-entered the 
palace and there was no one to tell him the meaning of 
what he had seen. After this accident, to him incompre- 
hensible or monstrous — or perhaps confirming the dread 
that had hitherto been but inexactly rooted — he accepted 

^ Lafayette's. 



PARIS 131 

what can only have been hitherto a plot formed by 
others. He looked, not yet mdeed to the foreigner, but 
to the frontier -^ for safety, and was ready for flight. 

Two months separated this accident from that 
catastrophe. They were marked by a temper of acute 
antagonism rather than by any appearance of definite 
policy. Historians upon either side pretend to find in 
these months the beginnings of republicanism in the 
clubs or the symptoms of overt treason at the Court. 
It is the spirit of the time rather than the exact witness 
of documents that provokes them to such exaggeration. 
The plain truth is that while the Crown and the politi- 
cians still kept their old claims intact the disappearance 
of Mirabeau had left an unbridgeable gulf between the 
parties. It was not more than this. There were many 
who would have been willing enough to have demanded 
openly the help of the kings in the defence of their 
King, but they did not direct the policy of the Court. 
That policy still depended upon the decision of Louis, 
and Louis, though bewildered by a thousand suggestions, 
would not as yet have let drop the nation he ruled into 
the abyss of an invasion. There were many, again, espe- 
cially on the south side of the river, in the University, 
in the Cordeliers, who would openly have attacked the 
palace. But they did not direct the opinion of the city. 
They can hardly be said to have influenced the Jacobins 
who were now become the permanent judges and 
moderators of the revolutionary movement, and stood 
for an organised force covering the whole of France 
with a system of societies. 

Since, then, an acute tension in the political atmos- 
phere accompanied by a certain pettiness in political 
action was the mark of that opening summer. Persons 

1 I take it as certain that he intended nothing but a flight to the high 
hill of Montm^dy, and that he remembered Mirabeau's advice of finding a 
refuge in the provinces. 



132 ROBESPIERRE 

began to take the place of principles in the affections, 
terrors, and hatreds of men. Thus Lafayette and the 
ministry became an object of direct persistent attack and 
thus Robespierre himself passed more and more for the 
pure democracy of which he was but the sign and the 
title. It is curious to note how in the very moment 
that public report, in spite of himself, exalted him — 
in this triumph of individuals — Robespierre could not 
find it in him to speak the names of opponents or to 
unsheath invective. He was thrown back, as it were, 
upon his literary faculty ; he seemed to abandon combat. 

Contrast with such a mind Danton, about to attack 
Lafayette, the man ; quarrelling with him body to body 
on the day of the 1 8th of April. He had seen, touched, 
and felt that stiff, but rather sentimental personality. 
It was through the medium of such real and physical 
acquaintance that men of Danton's kind appreciated the 
growth of the reaction. They knew that the National 
Guard was becoming more and more the middle class 
armed; they knew that a conflict between it and the 
mass of popular opinion might any day break out ; but 
they summed up their knowledge in their mistrust of 
Bailly and of Lafayette. 

Eobespierre, in proportion as the quarrel approached, 
withdrew himself more and more into generalities. He 
saw the danger of the National Guard turned a weapon 
for the counter-revolution, but to meet that danger he 
could do nothing but recite as a speech a vast essay full 
of just reasoning. An appeal for a purely democratic 
organisation of the militia took the place with him of 
definite political action at the end of April, and, what is 
yet more characteristic of the man, this essay was but a 
repetition and expansion of an opinion which he had 
already laid down four months before, when no crisis 
called for it, and when only a man enamoured of absolute 
principles could have dealt with the matter at all. 



PARIS 133 

This abstraction is illustrated in his every action, but 
two especially mark and emphasise it. It was he who 
broke the continuity of the revolutionary parliaments, and 
it was he, of all others, who at such a time attempted to 
abolish capital punishment. 

It was on the 1 8th of May that he urged the Assembly 
to the decree which contributed so much to the disasters 
of the succeeding year, for it was he who opposed with 
the most convincing pertinacity the re-election of the 
members of the Assembly whose term was drawing to a 
close. There could be found no better proof of his 
temper and of the .surroundings that put a halo on that 
unreality of his, than the proposal of such a decree at 
such a moment. The confidence that they were building 
up something eternal inspired his audience ; a conviction 
that immediate matters should never disturb fundamental 
decisions inspired the orator. If there were one thing 
desirable to a man that could foresee the advent of war, 
and the outbreak of an acute conflict between the Kevolu- 
tion and the Crown (one thing that Mirabeau, had he 
survived, would have demanded), that thing would have 
been the retention in public office of the men who were 
now familiar with the machinery they had created. But 
it is common to all systems of democracy to demand a 
rotation in the distribution of power, and as though no 
immediate considerations interfered, as thous^h France 
were really at leisure to build up her Utopia, Robespierre 
proposed, argued, and carried his theorem. The majority 
was enormous, and the pamphlets of all the revolutionaries, 
from Desmoulins to Barrk'e,^ applauded and pointed out 
as its author the unique probity of Robespierre. 

In his denunciation of capital punishment, at the 
same period of monotonous political work, the curious 
will not fail to notice a certain humour. That contrast 
lay in no inconsistency of character; the speech was 

^ See Riv. de France et dcs Boyaumes, No. 78 ; Patriote Frangais, 647. 



134 ROBESPIERRE 

thoroughly in keeping with his manner, proceeded from a 
profound conviction, was of a piece in its classical quota- 
tion, in its pedantic balance, with every portion of his 
legislation. Nor was he alone in pursuing the ideal of 
Rousseau. Petion, a man of just, profound, and exact 
decision, well versed in jurisprudence, and of a very 
practical acquaintance with men, agreed with and sus- 
tained him. Robespierre would have abolished capital 
punishment even for political crimes. The Assembly, 
startled and dignified by phrases that were not without 
nobility, yet refused to follow him, and heard unpersuaded 
a true stroke : " Every time you kill a man by law you 
destroy something of the sacredness of man." 

Standing here at the gates of the civil war, fifteen 
months from the massacres of September, the whole 
discussion seems to us unreal. Marat, who more than 
any other had ready in him the beginnings of violence, 
and who was, so to speak, the Terror already in being, 
felt its falseness, and quarrelled with the conclusions of 
Robespierre ; ^ but it would not be just to find in the 
debate an exceptional ignorance of the conditions under 
which France lay. It was not doubted in '91 that all 
this thrashing out and settling of the principal points 
of the code would be final, and the sincere energy which 
Robespierre displayed in the matter proceeded from a 
belief which he certainly held in common with the mass 
of his contemporaries, that the last foundations of a new 
state were being laid. 

The discussions went on their peaceable way, raising 
him, as it was their special function to do, higher and 
higher in the public esteem. There were in early June 
wearisome verities on the liberty of the Press ; he quoted 
Cato. He spoke (as on a foregone conclusion) condemning 
the attack that a priest had made against the Parliament. 
He was a candidate for the fortnightly presidency of the 

'^ Ami du Peuple, 48. 



PARIS 135 

Parliament, and failed. He attempted single-handed to 
speak against tlie pensions of recalcitrant officers. In 
these meaningless debates he confirmed his power with 
the general; he did not arouse the animosity of the 
minority. It would seem as if for the moment even the 
attacks upon him in the royalist journals had ceased, 
and as if the position he now occupied, a position of 
security and of rather banal prominence, was principally 
due to his imperfections of mental vision, to his care 
against mixing with the immediate quarrel of the time, 
and perhaps to his failure to perceive where that quarrel 
was tending. Yet this period left an enduring mark upon 
his career. It was at this moment, for example, that he 
was elected to one of the numerous forensic functions, 
now thrown open to the popular choice : he that had 
already been chosen for the chief magistrate of Versailles 
was now made public prosecutor of the town of Paris, and 
it was also upon the tradition of these six weeks that he 
set the foundation of the permanent hegemony which he 
began to exercise over the Club and the city when, two 
months later, the great Assembly closed. He resigned 
the functions to which he had been elected by Versailles, 
not (as he pretends in his letter to that town) because it 
was his duty to accept those for which Paris had chosen 
him, but because he was now embedded in the political 
temper of the capital, a temper from which he could no 
longer escape, and which had absorbed the whole of 
his mind. 

It was during this peaceable and monotonous advance 
that there fell upon the recollection and security of his 
new life the disturbance of the 20th of June; the flight 
of the royal family, their recapture, the long suspense 
that ended in the massacre of the Champ de Mars. 

It is nearly always true of the great days of the 
Revolution, especially of the scenes in its earlier period, 
that they leave Robespierre aside. It is true of this as of 



13^ ROBESPIERRE 

the rest. By an accident wliicli fitted strangely well witli 
his character, he had on that day of the 20th of June 
strolled out of Paris to enjoy the flattery and regrets 
of Versailles. When he returned to the city it was to 
find the uproar of consternation, the King's flight dis- 
covered ; and to hear a word that, had he been at all of 
the stuff of those he led, would have illuminated his 
mind. Condorcet had pronounced the word " Republic." ^ 

He returned to the Assembly in the early afternoon 
of the following day. He made a speech of no moment 
to the Jacobins in the evening, he added such a common- 
place declaration as might be demanded of him, but 
admitted at least these picturesque words that he was 
" willing to be rid of the royal individual who cost forty 
millions." 

When he came to be alone and with his friends he 
was altogether disturbed, and it was clear that he had 
lost his footing. For such men, who live in ideas rather 
than in their application, a continuity of the social 
medium is a necessity. They must, so to speak, find 
leisure in the constant habits of their environment, or 
their minds would be too much disturbed to follow out 
the ceaseless definitions of the intellect. The flight of the 
King shattered all the security and all the continuity 
which, after the first great change of base in '89, had 
continued for two years to mark the society in which 
the Revolution moved. If the King's object were to 
escape beyond the frontiers, and if he succeeded in that 
object, the whole State was put in the gravest peril, and 
the disturbing factor, which Robespierre was later to 
combat with such insistence, the advent of war, was made 
certain and immediate. Upon this scheme of a remo- 

^ There is an endless discussion as to who first spoke that word. A 
hundred had used it in their writings. I think Aulard has proved that it 
was first proposed to abolish monarchy in the drawing-room of the 
Condorcets. 



PARIS 137 

delled state (to whose last touches lie had so largely 
contributed and whose very design he had done so much 
to plan) was thrust the necessity, perhaps, of a whole 
reconstruction by the flight of the King. The machinery 
of the executive was dissolved. The checks with which 
the new situation was surrounded had for a moment 
disappeared. The constitutionals were made by this 
accident into bitter conservatives. 

Petion lived then in the Faubourg St. Honore, 
beyond where the English embassy now stands. That 
afternoon, the afternoon of the 21st, Kobespierre went 
round to his rooms during the short recess in the session 
of the Assembly. He met there (in company with 
Brissot), the future light of the Gironde, the woman who 
had come up to Paris five months before and who was 
already beginning to exercise upon the political society of 
the capital an influence Avhich she retained till death ; 
the wife of old Poland. It was in the presence of her 
form and attraction that this little committee of ex- 
tremists debated the problem which the flight of the 
royal family had created.-^ 

To the more square-built and deeper Pt^tion the solution 
was in that great name, " The Republic," which was to 
become in a short year an idol for all the people. Robes- 
pierre, with his httle laugh, bit his nails nervously and 
asked once or twice, " AVhat is a Republic ? " France 
was not yet republican at all, and he was not the one to 
feel the magic of words. He took then the extreme 
leadership of indignation, but nothing more. The Parlia- 
ment had refused to decide anything ; had talked of " the 
King's abduction " ; Robespierre turned from them to his 
special field, to the Jacobins, and that night put on an 

^ On this passage Dumont is a common liar. Madame Roland is trust- 
worthy upon facts, but upon tendencies and judgments embittered and 
biassed. See her " Memoirs," i. 298, 299 (ist edition). 



138 ROBESPIERRE 

attitude in the dim chapel,^ to protect his ill-ease he 
lifted the shield of demagogy, and began that litany of 
himself which wearied and alienated within three years 
the more practical of his followers. 

It was ten at night when he stood in the tribune of 
the club. The opportunities of the moment gave him 
daring ; he impeached the confusion and the hesitation of 
the deputies and turned their meaningless phrase, " the 
abduction of the King," into an accusation of treason; 
then once more he exalted himself, and pretended that 
such clear words might lead him to his death. This false 
effect — for it can hardly have been other than consciously 
false — led to cheers. He stood up silent in a storm of 
praise. The ovation was witnessed by the ministers, 
by Bailly, by Lafayette, by all that from conviction, or 
doubt, or habit, were determined to use the occasion for 
the purposes of reaction. They entered at the moment his 
speech closed. It seemed as though the King's flight 
was to throw the two armies of opinion one at the other, 
and as though Kobespierre would be found once for all in 
the camp against which Lafayette was determined to lead 
an assault with whatever he could gather of the armed 
militia he had so long commanded. Danton was there ; 
in a violent and direct phrase he accused these men as 
they entered of treason, and he enveloped Robespierre 
in the armour of the Cordeliers : thrust him among the 
fighters. Next day that vision of immediate hostility 
was dispelled. It was learned that the royal family had 
been stopped, and were returning. 

The word " Republic " was silenced, the old conditions 
reappeared, shaken and uncertain indeed, but still the 
only basis upon which political discussion could move. 
All retreated somewhat from the position of those violent 
three days, the reaction threatened less loudly; the 

^ The club had moved earlier ia June from the library to the deserted 
chapel of the monastery. 



PARIS 139 

democrats consented to resume the discussion of the 
Constitution. 

There followed three weeks in which the angry dis- 
content of the populace and the demand for the King's 
dismissal found none but chance and irresponsible leaders. 
That crisis ended in the presentation of the two petitions 
from the Cordeliers and from the Jacobins for the recon- 
sideration of the position of the King : if you will, for his 
abdication or removal. 

With the violence that was the outcome of that 
movement Robespierre is entirely dissociated. His name 
is continually mentioned as a leader by those who foresaw 
or who accelerated the approaching disaster, but he gives 
them no excuse for such an attitude. 

When the second great Federation had, on the 14th 
of July, brought up its great crowds of provincial revolu- 
tionaries to the city, he could find nothing less cautious 
than the phrase, " As for monarchs, let them so act as to 
make monarchy respected." He took a personal and 
active part in preventing the Club, of which he was now 
almost the master, from attacking the principle of 
monarchy. He urged and succeeded in persuading them 
to have nothing to do with the petition. 

The Federation had been held upon a Thursday. 
The Friday and Saturday he occupied in a determined 
effort to prevent extreme measures on the part of the 
malcontents ; it was one of his moments of energy. Here, 
as later, during the debate on the war, he saw violence 
endangering the reconstruction which occupied every 
faculty of his mind. It was evident that the old regime 
was arming. The senile Vadier, that had babbled of 
republicanism, was a sign of the change. He babbled 
a recantation. The various forces of reaction, which 
had taken so long to gain cohesion and discipline, 
were now united, and were ready to attack at a signal 
the discipline, the secrecy, the universal presence of the 



146 ROBESPIERRE 

Jacobins. On the eve of the quarrel Robespierre again 
spoke decisively against the public presentation of the 
petition to depose the King, and caused the club to 
send deputies to withdraw their portion of that petition, 
which was already upon the altar of the Champs de 
Mars. The Parliament had declared the petition illegal. 
He would abide within the law. All this pronounced 
attitude of his might be summed up in the contem- 
porary phrase of Brissot : " A law is passed, and we must 
obey it." 

The moment was too critical for such reservations 
to produce their effect. The following day, Sunday, the 
17 th, at evening, when the sun was setting or had set, 
the excesses of the crowd, their murder of two vagrants 
whom they thought spies,^ their defiance of the hasty 
decree which forbade the petition, their angry trooping 
to sign it, had led to the declaration of martial law. 
Bailly had appeared in the great empty plain where, 
three days before, the Federation had attempted to 
continue the traditions of unanimity and where the 
mound and altar in a lonely central place recalled the 
oath and upspringing of the preceding year. The con- 
flict between Lafayette's militia and the populace had 
taken place, the women, children, and married men had 
fallen, and before it was yet dark the massacre of the 
Champs de Mars had opened the short and violent 
reaction, the weeks of insolence which proved but a 
preface for greater and more terrible reprisals of 
years. 

That conflict determined a great change in the life 
of Robespierre. He left his loneliness in the Rue 
Saintonge, his vague popularity, his sacred distance, to 
enter into the familiar idolatry of one family; to be 

^ I use the phrase for shortness. It was not the crowd on the Champ 
de Mars who did this. It was the mob at the Gros Cailloux, whither the 
spies had been sent. 



PARIS 141 

made, as it were, a god of one known temple, to direct 
from a single and famous centre his increasing power 
over the later fortunes of the reform. 

If one would follow this transition, it is necessary to 
see him once more in the society of which he had become 
the spokesman. 

The Jacobins were in session. In the flood of the 
reaction, in the victory of the conservatives, all but a 
handful of the politicians had already resigned their 
tickets : half-a-dozen alone remained, surrounded by the 
ordinary members. The impoverished club had met 
as usual after the dinner-hour, and as the long summer 
light was failing, and the candelabra were beginning 
to make shadows in the vaults and to show the gaps 
in the long benches of the nave, there came to its 
remnant of deputies,^ with their great band of radical 
voters beside them, the news of what had passed at sun- 
set on the Champs de Mars. Almost simultaneously 
with that passionate rumour they heard the loud cries 
of opponents without, and the clanking jostle of arms 
that goes with a mob of irregulars. The National Guard, 
the bourgeoisie in arms, were coming back east from their 
fatal error ; a great group of them had passed, or been 
forced by the rush of the riotous return, out of the Rue 
St. Honore into the irregular square that formed the 
entrance to the old hall of the convent. There they 
stood shouting and hooting for awhile against the radi- 
cals, and feeding by their insult the growing passion 
within. 

The club had rarely tolerated tumult, especially at 
this stage of the reform. Extreme as it already was in 

1 Eoederer, Eobespierre, Buzot, CorroUer, Boyer (the bishop), Potion. 
All the other liberal deputies had seceded the day before, and formed 
■what was afterwards known as "The Feuillants," that held their 
meeting in the convent over the way. Many returned later on the 
address which Kobespierre himself drew up and presented in the name 
of thie parent society. 



142 ROBESPIERRE 

principle, and fanatical as tlie wars were to make it in 
the near future, yet so far it had maintained a habit of 
composure. Its membership — it was for much the 
greater part made up of professional men — its sense of 
its own importance, the academic theses which it de- 
lighted to discuss, lent it an undue gravity, and pre- 
served it from the habitual violence that was even then 
a feature of the Cordeliers, and that the invasion evoked 
later in every public meeting. But that night they gave 
way to a furious hubbub which proceeded at once from 
their indignation at the action of Lafayette, from the 
suddenness of the conflict, and the fear of the unknown 
in the darkness that immediately succeeded it. Their 
vehement anger was nourished by that mingling of im- 
potence and confusion which of all things will most 
exasperate men met in numbers. It was they that had 
originated the petitions, yet it was they also that had 
withdrawn first and had counselled prudence. In a 
sense they felt themselves part authors of this tragedy ; 
they only raged the more against the men and the policy 
whose stupidity had led to such a climax. Through the 
uproar, which drowned debate as the night deepened, 
Robespierre alone made his high voice heard. In a 
speech that has not come down to us, but whose manner 
and persistence were of the kind to which the club 
always listened, he put some measure to their excite- 
ment, and by half-past ten or thereabouts, aided by the 
exhaustion and curiosity of his audience, he had reduced 
the fire to embers ; before eleven the chapel was empty- 
ing, the members rising from their benches. Madame 
Roland, who had been present at this meeting, bethought 
herself of Robespierre as she sat at home surrounded by 
the growing terrors of the crisis. She went, or says she 
went,^ up into the Rue Saintonge in the Marais to offer 

1 A little inconsistently, since she also says in her " Memoirs " that, at 
the same hour, she was refusing shelter to Eobespierre's early friend^ 



PARIS 143 

him asylum in her house ; but she tells us that when 
she got to his door, somewhat before midnight, he had 
not yet returned. In this she is truthful, though she 
is wrong in ascribing terror to a man who was as igno- 
rant of panic as of valour. What had happened was 
this. 

There was in the meeting at the Jacobins a man 
called Duplay. A Highlander from Auvergne, ruddy, 
tall, and strong, though verging upon age; a master 
carpenter by trade, of some property, an owner of horses, 
and a type of the older generation. He had welcomed 
the Kevolution as the climax of the theories that had 
entertained his class and its superiors for a lifetime. 
His ready and simple mind had found in the oratory of 
Kobespierre the same quality of expression that took 
captive then and for years the middle classes of the 
capital. Duplay's single devotion to those few and 
fundamental political ideas which were the main interest 
of his life, made him a kind of devotee of the speaker 
who presented them with such clearness, and whose 
narrow deductions never wandered by an inch from their 
guidance. Moved as much by charity as by this distant 
hero-worship, he came to the rescue of his idol, seeing in 
him a man who would not comprehend the risks which 
that evening had produced. And in this he was an acute 
observer, for Robespierre in the great crises of his life, 
partly from excessive introspection, partly from a natural 
inaptitude to grasp reality, was blind alike to opportunity 
and to danger. He stood beside the door as Robespierre 
was making to go out, told him his name, and begged 
him to hide, if only for that night, in his house. The 
younger man was persuaded, and followed him. 

The street was full of menace ; the terror of the short 
reaction was already weighing upon Paris. The mode- 

Madame Robert, on the plea that her house was too well known by 
Lafayette's faction. 



144 ROBESPIERRE 

rates and the strong tories were thorouglily allied ; the 
alliance was still numerous and powerful ; it had used its 
weapons and had won its first skirmish ; the National 
Guard could be relied upon. They thought, perhaps, that 
they were winning a campaign, and with the feverish 
haste of uncertain men, the mere six hours after the com- 
mand to fire were long enough to give birth to a complete 
policy. They could not see that they had but pulled the 
first trigger in a civil war, that wounded mothers bring- 
ing in dead children were to furnish the arguments of 
the future, and that in two years poor Bailly himself was 
to meet death in the rain on the spot where he had given 
his orders to the Guard. For the moment the reaction 
had won. Danton was in flight, soon to be off on that 
short unknown visit to England.^ Desmoulins had 
thrown down his pen, and of all the group none were 
in greater danger than Robespierre. 

Duplay hurried him westward along the Rue St. 
Honore till they had nearly reached its end and stopped 
at last where the short Rue St. Florentin comes in from 
the south. Here on the north side of the street was a 
house which the lamp of the opposite opening picked out 
against the night.^ They passed through a wide arch- 
way into the outer courtyard, where great stacks of planks 
and lumber, a saw-pit, and a shed, marked Duplay's 
trade, and saw at the farther end of the paved quad- 
rangle a lower house connected by a wing with the front 
upon the street. 

A light shone in the windows ; they entered to find 
the wife and her two young daughters waiting anxiously 
to receive the master safe from the club on this night of 
clamour. He introduced his guest and they offered him 
a sanctuary, remembering his growing name. So, a little 

^ Of which I can find nothing save a mention in some private notes 
communicated to me by a friend that he lived in Greek Street, Soho. 
* See note 3 at the end of this book. 



PARIS 145 

before midniglit on this his first introduction to peril, he 
came under the roof which (with one trifling interval) 
was to be his home for three years of an unimagined 
fame, and on which he was to turn his eyes — so far as 
blood would let him — in the last hours of his life as he 
approached the neighbouring scaffold. 



CHAPTER V 

THE WAR 

The year between the domestic victory of Lafayette and 
the fall of the monarchy is a labyrinth or a crucible. 
There passes into it and is lost, all of that first reform 
which was imagined to have achieved finality; there 
emerges from it the high exaltation of the Republic. 
The Constitution of 1791, " which might be revised, but 
not for thirty years," ^ was a vast reconstruction : the 
decent tradition of Europe cleared of excrescence ; suited 
to the philosophy of the time ; made normal. It was full 
of detail ; its multitudinous parts had received the exact 
attention of lawyers ; statesmen had debated its checks 
and balances. The spirit of '93 was a creation, or at the 
least the resurrection of some infinite past in the race; 
it had the simplicity and the violence of a religion, its 
consequence and propaganda, called by a thousand names, 
are the leavening ferment of the modern world. What 
was the nature of the maze in which the sober common- 
places of the leisured were lost (they have not reappeared), 
and of what kind was the chemistry which fused the old 
elements into this prime matter of equality ? Two con- 
temporaneous accidents answer this question : the Great 
War and the nature of the new Parliament. 

Of the war I shall deal in its place. It was the 
governing condition that dominated the mind of Europe ; 
we are altogether its heirs. But the war would not have 
fulfilled the plan of history, nor have given rise to the 

1 The decree of 31st August 1791. On this decree an historian has 
passed the commentary, ' ' Oh, human decisions, how frail ye are I " 

146 



THE WAR 147 

spectacle of democracy had it not in its origin contended 
against forces so complex and so resistant as to provoke 
an intense activity. The Revolution was compelled to 
develop energies hitherto unknown in degree and sur- 
passing the line that bounds experience. The dense 
medium that so compelled it to call up new things, was 
furnished by the constitutional contrasts of 1791. I 
would therefore detail at some length what kind of dis- 
crepancies the Legislative Assembly displayed, nor will 
the description, though tedious, be found irrelevant, for it 
explains the continued increase of Robespierre. 

The Legislative Assembly appears at first sight to be 
but the natural successor of the Constituant. Accus- 
tomed in our modern politics to the regular procession of 
parliaments, we see the second Assembly coming in natural 
order after the dissolution of the first ; it is more demo- 
cratic, because the general march of the nation is towards 
democracy, it proceeds to certain extremes, it declares 
war. The conservative elements of 1789— 1791 dis- 
appear during the year of the Legislative. At last, 
again in a natural order, the term of its powers intro- 
duces in 1792 a third, and yet more extreme. Assembly, 
openly Republican, proceeding through the Terror to 
delirium, and finally to exhaustion in 1794. Such is 
the picture that the three Parliaments of the Revolution 
call up if they be examined superficially, and the Legis- 
lative appears in them as a natural link between the 
orderly hope of the Constituant and the prophetic fury 
of the Convention. But the picture is false. Not only 
was the spirit of the Legislative Assembly a tangle far 
more complex than that of a simple progression towards 
democracy, but the very causes of the dilemma of 1792 
and of the passion that followed its solution in war and 
insurrection lay buried at the heart of that tangle. 

In the first place, the Legislative Assembly was an 
anachronism. The electoral colleges which chose it were 



148 ROBESPIERRE 

themselves elected precisely at tlie moment when tlie King 
seemed — not without violence — to have been limited to 
his functions under the Constitution; for they were elected 
in early June before the flight to Vincennes. Nor were 
the electoral colleges even permitted to elect when the 
shock of the King's desertion had followed immediately 
upon their formation. Monarchist though they were, that 
blunder (had they proceeded to vote as the regulations 
demanded, in the last days of June) might have led them 
to the choice of men more determined or more violent 
than would earUer have suited their taste. The sharp 
definitions of the crisis might have created a clear 
national policy. As it was, the meeting of the electoral 
colleges was postponed till the 5 th of August. Before 
that date Lafayette had won, and their choice was exer- 
cised in the extreme of the great reaction. In a word 
then, the Legislative which, upon a national and universal 
suffrage would have been almost a Republican Assembly, 
was falsified not only by a restricted franchise, nor only 
by indirect election, but also and especially by the re- 
volution in opinion which lay between the moment of its 
origin and that of its first exercise of power. 

In the second place, the Legislative suffered in a 
higher degree than any other product of the Reform, 
from a divorce between its theoretical and its actual func- 
tions. It is a note of the whole Revolution that while 
its philosophy presupposed the peace and level of an 
absolutely normal state, the wild adventures in the midst 
of which it was compelled to act were abnormal in the 
extreme. A scientific accuracy in the delimitation of every 
new political power or commercial standard, an almost 
geometrical analysis of the commonwealth and a precise 
mechanical arrangement of all society — the whole based 
upon the tolerance and enlightenment of men secure in 
liberty — these acts of precision so roused and armed the 
love of ancient custom and the sad postulates of religion. 



THE WAR 149 

that not only every foreign, but many domestic interests 
openly challenged the change. War, rhetoric and even 
demagogy became the necessary methods whereby was 
defined and achieved a system whose object had been 
only peace and whose foundation lay in the cold abstrac- 
tions of science. The period teems with the ironic con- 
trast of just, or rather self-evident, decrees and the most 
enormous and violent illegalities. The Legislative was 
elected to carry out steadily in detail the Constitution 
whose general spirit had been defined in the preceding 
two years — it discovered the task of a European war. 
It was designed to argue points with the executive and 
to define the remaining petty doubts upon the exact 
power of the Crown — it found that Crown, and the exe- 
cutive dependent on it, actively intriguing with rebels 
and foreign enemies to destroy the Revolution. It was 
given the mission of an attorney and found itself com- 
pelled to the career of a soldier. This anomaly disturbed 
every issue in the year that saw the first invasion: it 
divided the counsels of the nation, shattered its internal 
unity, and raised up before the French the thing that 
bewilders and maddens a community — a danger hidden 
and elusive, enemies in the night. They could no longer 
be certain of their weapons or their authority. The 
people fell into an anarchy of doubt and violence, and 
there proceeded from this confusion of concealed powers 
a suspicion that became coextensive with the whole 
national life ; a terror that haunted, poisoned, and came 
very near to destroying France. 

But a third more tangible evil affected the twelve 
months during which this Parliament endured. The 
nation was no longer legally led by its principal men. 
The general impatience with a false and uncertain 
guidance, the popular action that consequently arose 
outside and against the government are the chief causes 
of the position which Robespierre assumed at this period. 



I50 ROBESPIERRE 

This therefore is the chief mark of the year : that 
because a decree forbade the re-election of Members 
of the last Parliament, the clubs, the old leaders of 
the first year, the established reputations — all France — 
worked as it were in spite of the Parliament. Thus the 
nation thought itself able to neglect the deputies and thus 
arose among the revolutionaries that disastrous rivalry 
between the politicians that were within and those that 
were without the walls of the new Assembly. This 
rivalry at last became the quarrel of the Mountain and 
the Gironde. 

There is this great weakness attaching to government 
by representation, that it presupposes an eminence in 
those elected. Direct mandate and delegation are justly 
the theory of a special crisis, but the general life of 
any deliberative assembly is necessarily senatorial; for 
who can be at the pains of evoking the General Will 
of his constituents at every five minutes of the working 
day, or what General Will however lively could stand 
the strain of so frequent a resurrection ? If therefore 
the senate is discovered to be composed of very mediocre 
men and if the commerce, science and military grades 
of a nation have their leaders elsewhere, there must 
fall upon it the contempt and impotence that always 
go with a discrepancy between authority and power. It 
is true that some nations attempt to evade this danger by 
a sublime fiction and pretend to see in the deputy some- 
thing other than the man himself, making him, as it were, 
a being whose very ordinary exterior conceals an inspired 
genius. The price of this comfortable superstition is a 
tangle of anomalous laws, a lethargy in the action of 
government, the exhaustion of wealth, military disaster 
and a gradual decline. 

There is no space for me to enter here into the discus- 
sion of this vice in parliaments, a vice which has succeeded 
in weakeninor then consideration throughout the modern 

o o 



THE WAR 151 

world. It is enough for the purpose of this book to 
point out that the disaster of possessing a representative 
assembly below the height of its mission has been avoided 
for great spaces of time in a variety of ways: by so 
framing the machinery of election as to make it cor- 
respond with the hierarchy of excellence that everywhere 
exists, by providing through the criticism of permanent 
officials some test for the ability of the elected, and so 
forth. In the Revolution, the French people whose 
passion for municipal affairs, whose strict and cen- 
tralised homogeneity, and whose general level of in- 
telligence fit them ill for the parliamentary system, 
were upon two great occasions well served in the accident 
of election. The Constituant Assembly of 1789, pro- 
ceeding from every corporate body and consulting local 
patriotism, had collected in one place the talent and 
energy of the nation ; the Convention of 1792, springing 
as it were from the inspiration of a people in arms, or 
rather at bay, gathered what was most powerful and 
most ready in the new spirit of the wars and discovered 
a common enthusiasm wherewith to transform for the 
moment its most insignificant members. In either case an 
exceptional occasion of supreme interest to all produced 
for France an exceptional success in a political method of 
which she has always divined the fallacy and suspected 
the oligarchic and corrupt tendencies. 

The Legislative had no such fortune. The resolution 
of the 1 8 th of May which forbade re-election, typical as it 
was of that theoretical calm against which every circum- 
stance cried out, might have suited Utopia or a small 
republic at peace : it was fatal to France in 1791. The 
tried men, the standard-bearers of the sects, the very 
buffoons who were the foil to such dignity, were excluded 
from the Parliament. Barnave, off, marrying himself 
in Grenoble ; Cazalfes wandering in England ; Barrke 
silent ; the Abb6 Maury half in hiding ; Bailly rethred to 



152 ROBESPIERRE 

Nantes, were so many landmarks of public attention 
withdrawn. As for tlie members who remained in activity 
their popularity or public effect still further weakened 
the moral authority of the Parliament. Si^yes was 
working and publishing in the conservative and high 
assembly called the Department of Paris ; Robespierre 
was the public prosecutor-elect of Paris, a leader and 
master in the Jacobins ; Desmoulins was the chief pam- 
phleteer of the advance ; Lafayette was again a general on 
service, soon to be in command of the frontier; strong 
Potion was the mayor of Paris. 

Thus whatever France had come to regard as the political 
world was standing apart, conducting its own campaigns. 
The Parliament upon which was to fall the task of resolu- 
tion and action in the face of Europe seemed at its origin 
to be separate and to suffer from insignificance ; later it 
appeared dependent on the clubs. Were it my business 
(which, thank Heaven, it is not) to write down here the 745 
names of those who composed it, readers fully acquainted 
with the Revolution might recognise a dozen ; the rare 
students who have examined every detail of the period 
might pretend to the knowledge of some thirty; those 
whose general education has been supplemented by some 
reading upon the period would be arrested by four or 
perhaps five names — they would see Vergniaud, Carnot, 
Condorcet, Herault de Sechelles . . . Couthon . . . Brissot. 
So far a general thesis of inevitable monotony has 
occupied my description of this transition. It has been 
necessary to introduce it in order to show on what new 
platform Robespierre was to stand. Freed from the dis- 
cipline and general talent of the Assembly, segregated, a 
unique figure, already in public office, having for his 
centre of effort a small and highly favourable debating 
hall — everything conspired to " set " him, as it were, in 
the framing that suited him best. Some few knew well, 
he himself had not yet begun to suspect, that the isola- 



THE WAR 153 

tion of a nascent idolatry, the new pedestal that cut him 
off from experience, were to falsify his popularity, to lead 
him where he would not go, and at last, in '94, exhaust 
him altogether. No man can feed upon himself; these 
repetitive and single-sided men least of all. 

This mixture of isolation and of power is the story of 
Robespierre during all that autumn and winter of 1791-92: 
a power wholly unfruitful — as suited him — an isolation 
that belonged not only to the height of the tribune of the 
Jacobins or to the silence of an audience, but to the pro- 
found variance between his views upon foreign policy and 
those of general opinion. Nowhere is the paradox of his 
career more startling than now, when his very opposition 
but confirms the public trust in his probity. His ignorance 
of the great rising that is covering all France but empha- 
sise the abstraction, and (as was thought) the profundity 
of his faith. He counted more and more with the Jacobins, 
and therefore with the Revolution, because he seemed to 
care less than nothing for their bias of the moment. They 
made him, as it were, an anchor for what they knew to be 
changeable in themselves. They swung to him as ships 
swing to their moorings in a strong tide-way. 

Consider the decline of 1791, and the thoughts of 
which the peasantry, the citizens, the salons — all that 
lived outwardly — were full as the days shortened into the 
winter darkness and the fate of war. The peasantry had 
bought the Church land ; even now it was ploughing. 
The under-quarrel of the priest and the schismatic had 
pierced through the enveloping verbiage with which it had 
as yet been covered, and the ceaseless vitality of religion 
had reappeared to startle all that philosophy of the pedantic 
rich. Reason, standing single, had shrivelled in the flame 
that came up out of nature against it. There was no 
" civil " church, there was no " Galilean " establishment — 
there was nothing save Catholicism seeking its enemy: 
the master-error of the early Revolution was discovered. 



154 ROBESPIERRE 

It had thought to have given decent guarantees to a 
superstition dying, and it found it had insulted a religion 
whose intensity increased with time. From this crisis 
there arose the first threat of the civil war. To take but 
the clergy as an example. While half the clergy mourned 
their country in silence, half saw nothing of moment 
either in country or freedom but only in the Church of 
God. In such a passion dogma and theology, that are as 
abstract and as deductive as the Kevolution itself (it is 
their child), were forgotten ; the concrete objects of the 
moment seemed all in all. For instance, Avignon, on 
Avhich a thousand jests had passed for ages, which Catho- 
licism had forgotten, became in an hour a sacred ground. 
It was an island in France, an historical absurdity, an 
inheritance of the Papacy's degradation and corruption, 
a memory of enslavement, something to be bought out — 
no matter, it was sacred ground. The mere demand for 
the civic oath, the mere proclamation of the reunion with 
French soil, led to the massacre of Lescoyer at the altar — 
a massacre directed by women. On that news, the French- 
men of the old city felt a small implacable thing menac- 
ing the unity of the nation and their liberty : they killed 
it. The Tower of the Glaciere, a bastion of that castle 
which seems a rock and is huge enough to hold all the 
dead bodies of the middle ages, was filled with their 
victims. And to this one chief disaster a hundred 
menaces attached throughout the kingdom. In the 
Cevennes the villages fought faction fights of Heretic 
and Catholic ; in Vendue and in Brittany the churches 
were seized from the schismatics ; at Caen, right in the 
town, a schismatic priest had been thrown from his ofiice 
at the very altar. 

The agony of a divided allegiance worked on and 
infuriated the public mind. France Catholic had bought 
the land of the establishment, and the heart of France is 
in the land. The peasant, who had made all the elder 



THE WAR 155 

saints and half tlie ritual, clung sullenly to his posses- 
sions. " By our Lady," he had a right to his purchase : 
all his gods confirmed him. 

France, atheist, refined and vicious, the pestilence of 
the eighteenth century, was suddenly become a sound 
fanatic. Lord ! how evil was this Kevolution, how blasphe- 
mous ! The little marquises at Coblenz and at Turin 
were astonished at the licence of manners. Catherine 
of Russia was all chastity, chivalry, and would help 
Gustavus of Sweden, a Quixote of Marie Antoinette's; 
fleets were to be sent to the coasts of Brittany by those 
admirable devotees of celibacy. 

Thus when this religious war was conceived, all the 
nation was in a turmoil. With the exception of that very 
small minority — the refined agnostics of the governing 
classes, the rare and the isolated mountain villages 
where Protestantism was still a social force — there was 
no one in whom the old religion, dwindled to indifference, 
did not knock at the heart : yet there was hardly any 
one either (save in some definitely rebel districts) who 
did not painfully refuse to attack the Revolution, and feel 
some indignation at the honest fanaticism of the clerical 
Revolt. This tearing apart of the affections led to every 
violence and embittered every phrase, for nearly every 
man became a kind of enemy to his own childhood; 
such evil had the self-sufficiency of the Constituant 
Assembly and the blunder of the Civil Constitution of 
the Clergy already achieved. 

But in the rising storm, see how little Robespierre 
comprehended. He had maintained his friendly con- 
nection with his friends in the Church ; he had made a 
speech or two in mild defence of the clergy, treating 
the whole matter by the light of his principles, seeing in 
religion at least some necessary dogmas, and in the priest 
a puzzling citizen. The mustering for civil war he still 
took for a calm field in which he might sow his theories. 



156 ROBESPIERRE 

In the very days when the awful tragedy of the Glaci^re 
was acted in the crossways of the South, he was off on 
a triumphal tour to his province, to greet his brother 
and sister at Arras, to be drawn in his carriage by the 
citizens, to be delighted at the illumination of the town 
in his honour, to receive a civic crown for himself and 
for the absent Potion (whose name was so often coupled 
with his own), to rest in a local glory from what had 
certainly been the devoted labour of two wonderful years. 
It would not be just to say that he saw nothing of the 
religious ferment, but the very rarity and insignificance 
of his allusions to it heightens the impression of unreality 
which this passage in his life conveys. He goes to call 
upon an old friend, a connection of that Abbey of St. 
Waast under whose shadow he had played as a child, 
and of that good bishop, De Conzie, who had befriended 
his youth. He is coldly received and wonders why! 
He hears of a miracle in some church or other of the 
town (a lame man hearing the mass of a non-juring 
priest threw down his crutches and walked) ; he mentions 
the matter in a letter to Paris,^ not with indignation 
nor with doubt, but with a tolerant and commonplace 
irony, the faint echo of Voltaire : such a comment as 
might have slipped into some satirical verse or other at 
the Rosati, years before the Revolt. 

All the long debate of October, the fierce decrees 
of November, sent powerful reverberations throughout 
the provinces. The Assembly was being led at last. 
Young men from the South had given that inchoate, 
unknown body of youth a voice ; the steady flame of 
Vergniaud, the gusts of Isnard were creating the in- 
fluence which was later to be called the " Gironde." It 
was just before Robespierre's departure that Gensonn^ 
had presented his report upon the condition of the West, 
showing how far the religious quarrel had proceeded. 

i Written to Duplay on the 17th of October. 



THE WAR 157 

It was the day after his return to Paris (the 29th of 
November) that the Assembly passed the violent decree 
which covered the Church with the first shadow of the 
Terror. 

His absence therefore exactly corresponded with the 
crisis which first in all the revolutionary movement 
caused the French to step outside equality and reason 
and to initiate exceptional laws. Yet he said nothing 
of it either in his speeches at Bethune (in which sad 
town a second ovation awaited him) ^ nor in his letters 
home. Fauchet, the constitutional Bishop of Caen, had 
asked for extreme measures ; Forn^, who held a similar 
office in Bourges, who modelled himself upon Robes- 
pierre,^ had said everything in favour of leniency. 
Isnard in a manner magnificent and terrible, but 
touching upon fanaticism, had called the whole move- 
ment rebellion (which it was) and had passed the 
extreme of violence when he said, "No God but the 
Law," when he shouted that no trial and no witnesses 
were needed against manifest insurrection (November 
14). The committee had closed its sitting, the decree 
passed. The civic oath was to be administered to the re- 
fractory clergy within a week ; a refusal made the refuser 
suspect. He could be domiciled at discretion ; if he 
disobeyed an order as to his domicile he could be 
imprisoned for a year. This violent climax, a decision 
which the Crown vetoed, ended the first phase of the 
religious quarrel. 

One indication only of what he might have said at 
the Jacobins, had he not chosen such a time as suitable 
for a visit to his native place, we have in his letter to 
that club, and the occasion of it is a whole commentary 

^ To those who are acquainted with this town it may be interesting to 
hear that he stopped at the sign of the Golden Oak. 

^ This man was one of the many who had an idolatry for Maximilian. 
He was a don of the University of Toulouse ; between sixty and seventy 
years of age, and mad. 



158 ROBESPIERRE 

upon his continual attitude towards Catholicism : an entry 
into his mind. It was upon the 9th of November, just 
when the debate hung even, that Condorcet published 
in his paper, the Courrier de Paris, a supposed letter of 
Robespierre's. It declared that no principle of toleration 
should apply " to the faith that is intolerant of all others." 
Condorcet was deceived; indeed he only gave the letter 
as "an extract communicated to him"; but it did not 
need Robespierre's immediate and vigorous denial to 
establish the falsity of the letter. It was opposed to aU 
he had said or thought during his whole political life. 
What is remarkable, then, is not that it was perceived to 
be an error on the part of the Courrier, but that Robes- 
pierre should have sent so immediately^ an emphatic, 
angry denial, to be read by Couthon, his friend, to the 
club when it was still turbulent with the conquering 
eloquence of Isnard. It meant that he still held abso- 
lutely in the close of 1791 to the principles that had 
seemed to him all-sufficient in 1789. Michelet has 
called his attitude throughout this initial year a traffick- 
ing with the priests, a determination to rely upon them 
in the future. It was nothing of the kind. It was 
simply the necessary consequence of logic in a mind 
that had not yet formed any plan of ambition, and that 
was as absolute and restricted as a mathematical identity. 
To no man (this letter said) could a question be asked of 
right upon his opinions, nor a punishment be inflicted for 
a true answer, nor should any be constrained to follow this 
or that declaration of faith or discipline. 

If he had been all but silent upon the religious 
quarrel, he was entirely so upon a matter that yet might 
have given him much more opportunity for discussion, 
and that worked in the new debates parallel with the 

* It must have been despatcheii the moment the post reached the 
north, and have been a hot answer by return, for there are but five days 
between the printing of the sheet and the arrival of his denial. 



THE WAR 159 

question of the priests. This matter was the ques- 
tion of the emigration. He had spoken already 
in the earlier months of the year defending the 
right of all to come and go. I cannot but believe that 
if he neither wrote one word nor on his return made one 
allusion to the great debate on the proscription of the 
emigrants it was because he still clung to that absolute 
and useless principle of peaceful firmness. On this again 
he was directly opposed to the popular feeling, but far 
more certainly than in the dilemma of the religious in- 
surrection. The emigrants were (for the most part) 
frank traitors. There was no hypocrisy or mincing; 
they were willing to fight in defence of something 
superior to the nation — the feudal class of Europe. When 
the man whose fierce name recurs like a chorus through- 
out these scenes, Isnard again, come from a dry place, 
the harsh deserts of the Rhone, Isnard, " the wind of 
Africa," had startled all the Assembly with a truth, 
France was solid in applause. For he had said, " I ask 
this Assembly and France . . . and you, sir ! " — to a 
startled noble that had groaned — " whether any one will 
maintain that these men are not plotting against their 
country ; " he flamed into menace, talked of " the punish- 
ments of the people that resemble the punishments of 
God, since they work when the laws are silent." All 
that cavalry charge of his raised the Assembly to its 
feet. Its echo struck the Jacobins. A decree passed 
that the emigrants were to return at the New Year, or 
to be liable to confiscation and death. Robespierre, by 
speech to his surrounders in the north, and to his Paris 
home by letter, remained unapplauding.^ 

But I would not convey of this man, even in the 
preparatory time of mere applause, when he had not yet 

^ The answer of Monsieur to this decree is worth recalling: "In the 
name of all common sense, book i., section i. , article i., chapter i., para- 
graph i., come back to your right minds." 



i6o ROBESPIERRE 

approacTied the responsibility of power, an impression 
only of nullity and of the dry bones of thought. The 
stamp which he has left upon history is far too 
profound for such a judgment to be true. His con- 
victions, though they were but individual, pierced and 
acted ; when these convictions agreed with some prac- 
tical conclusion, he was full of argument, of application, 
and of judgment. 

This power or talent, which, as I say, appeared when 
some matter congenial to him had been matured by 
others for his reception, and when his mind (that com- 
monly worked in a void) was given something real which 
it could grasp, was very rapidly developed, and was perhaps 
publicly appreciated for the first time when the Jacobins 
began their great debate upon the war. 

From this moment Robespierre, who had been 
brought out from utter obscurity by the days of 
October, who had been given the first honours of 
debate in 1790, whom the death of Mirabeau had 
left with an exaggerated glory, and whom for six 
months the prestige of the Jacobins and the popular 
suffrage had still further advanced, passed into the 
public mind as a man capable of administration. 
He had pursued a policy, and presented a combined 
plan — much later, by incessant degrees, he was to 
attempt the executive function, and by a fatal error 
born of the blind energy of '93, the satisfaction of that 
ambition was to be granted him. 

He had returned upon the 25th of November to find 
a full tide going the way of the democrats ; Petion was 
elected mayor, Manuel was clerk, Danton his vicegerent ; 
extreme decrees had passed the Assembly by great 
majorities or unanimity. The petty fellow that a certain 
false kind of history would make him out to be would 
have drifted in such a torrent. But how can a man 
drift when the centre of his universe is in himself? 



THE WAR i6i 

Robespierre in tlie midst of this overwhelming tendency 
continued to develop his particular thesis. 

in Paris he found an insistent cry for war. There 
had come to the minds of all the moral certainty that 
attack was impending, that the only defensive was to strike. 
This instinct had impelled the city, was obtaining the 
provinces, on his return. He opposed it. His principal 
barrier was Isnard. 

This man, who resembled in his meagre and direct 
expression, in the light of his eyes and in his dark coun- 
tenance and rapid balance of words the principal orators 
of America ; who had in his spirit much of Jefferson or 
(to pass to the other pole), in his inspiration, a cousin- 
ship with Lincoln, was presiding at the Jacobins. A 
sword had been laid on the table by the tribune. He had 
accepted and embraced the sword. That sword ^ was the 
symbol of a crusade. He demanded war, and all France 
was ready to follow. The frenzy that can drive an 
assembly to the ridiculous had captured all the chapel 
when Robespierre came up, collected, into the tribune. 
Looking up at the public galleries with the same destruc- 
tive calm that had marked all his attitude for the year, 
changing his glasses for reading, he turned to his speech 
as to a task and declaimed his list of suspicions against 
the policy of war. 

Like so many of his public appeals, it has the length 
and tedium of a little book. For a solid hour it 
must have detained the club with its consecutive logic 
and with its occasional literary excellence; yet these 
wearying pages which a modern can scarcely complete 
were thought sublime. The Jacobins, whose majority 
continued to support Brissot with his cry for an im- 
mediate offensive, yet voted the printing of this speech, 
and one might see in the paradox of that vote all the 

1 Presented, I believe, by an American. 



1 62 ROBESPIERRE 

future success that lay before Eobespierre. They were 
devoted to him beyond the necessities of agreement.^ 

Two forces in him gave him this personal ascendancy 
over the club, and, through the club, over the elections of 
the next year, and through them at last over the nation. 
The first was his one talent ; a talent supremely important 
in the Revolution : he could manage a debate. He led 
on his audience continually, not always to the immediate 
triumph of his thesis, but invariably to a support and 
applause of himself; he never passed the limit of what 
popularity may dare. He supported the most uncon- 
genial proposition by a repetition of the cardinal principles 
which were the religious dogmas of the time and the 
invariable provokers of applause. Nor did the revolu- 
tionaries ever rise from some speech of his without 
experiencing the dangerous and useless satisfaction which 
proceeds from listening to the public utterance of our 
most cherished commonplaces. All through the debates 
which culminated in the speech of the 1 8th of December 
this suppleness, his continual reticence of phrase, mark 
his long fence with the Parliament, the war-party, the 
Gironde. He spared persons, he praised a defensive 
preparation, he laid emphasis on the disloyalty of the 
executive, he connected the whole of his arguments and 
made them depend upon the texts of the time. But 
he opposed war. 

And the second force was tenacity. This quality has 
upon the French in their political efforts an irresistible 
success, and if it is generally admirable in their eyes it 
becomes a kind of heroic virtue when the national 
character is intensified by some common danger. The 
consistency they seek in themselves, the base of con- 
viction which is necessary to their exact deductions, 
they will always seek and sometimes imagine in a 
leader. Here in Robespierre it was tangible. He 

1 The speech is in the journals of the society, Nos. no, in. 



THE WAR 163 

seemed to be their creed in person. They heard 
him, after the great voice of Vergniaud, the new storm 
of Isnard, the rising name of Guadet, still reasoning 
coldly and coming to his own conclusions unmoved. In 
the face of all Germany arming and of the preaching of 
civil war within, he could still repeat the old truths con- 
cerning the danger that standing armies are to liberty. 
This attitude which we now condemn because it palls on 
us the French then thought sublime, because such 
commonplaces were the reiteration of their safeguards. 
He did not gain majorities for his contention, but he 
finally confirmed the public faith in himself. 

Robespierre, then, at the head of a conquering opinion 
in general politics, yet stood alone, or nearly alone, on 
the one thing that mattered, combating the war and, 
among men who idolised him chiefly for his extremes, 
combating enthusiasm. When loyalty to the nation was 
synonymous with loyalty to political freedom and when 
every force that could excite the best minds — the 
avengement of insult, the strength that is impatient of 
challenge, the vision of free states throughout Europe, by 
which dream the Revolution lived — made straight for 
war, he passionless, stood out. It might be imagined that 
this isolation was fruitless in history. On the contrary, 
it had the highest effect upon the next two years. It 
preserved the Jacobins. He created, not indeed a mass 
of votes within them, but a nucleus in which resided 
their peculiar spirit : a very powerful political body lay 
entrenched outside the Parliament, the permanent opposi- 
tion of its leader to the principal policy of the Legislative 
Assembly gave a strength to all those irregular forces 
upon which — when the war and the defeats came — the 
salvation of the Revolution was to depend. The 
extremists had opposed war. When the war turned ill 
they had all the more right to direct it to success. 

This opposition and its increasing value is best seen 



1 64 ROBESPIERRE 

by following the sequence of events and the political 
adventures that, in the following three months, led up to 
the war. 

The great debate on the war at the Jacobins 
closed upon the 25 th of January. It had lasted two 
months, and had determined the fate of the Revolution 
more certainly than had the intrigues of the Court or the 
growing enthusiasm of the Parliament. For the club 
had now covered all France with its affiliated societies, 
and the vast body thus formed was a strict unity, 
organised, centralised, and moving like an army at com- 
mand. It possessed the force which the Constitution of 
1 79 1 had removed from politics, which the temper of 
the Girondins suspected and destroyed authority, dis- 
cipline whereby alone things corporate achieve indivi- 
duality and can exercise a single will. The Jacobins, 
not by voting for war (they presumed to no such decrees), 
but by emphasising throughout France the danger in 
which France lay, by urging the volunteers, by increasing 
the suspicion against the Court, and especially by the open- 
ness and publicity of their debates, had created the war. 
It was at this moment, with the opening of the new year, 
that the violent exaltation of spirit which the battles were 
destined to fix in permanence began to appear under the 
guidance of the club and to show itself in a mass of sym- 
bolism of ritual phrases and of sublime absurdities. The 
occasional red cap of the peasantry began to be worn for 
liberty in the debates, pikes were forged as though the 
spears of the armies of romance still had a use among 
guns, the King had become nothing but " the executive 
power," and every speech seemed to presuppose an 
imaginary and epic world. There had risen a gale of 
great adventures. 

This period had seen, also, all the decisive steps. 
The King's secret letter to his brother-in-law of Austria, 
the lover's stroke whereby Madame de Stael had forced 



THE WAR 165 

her Narbonne, dainty, graceful and confused, into the 
ministry of war, his foolish boastful report that seemed to 
take for granted the opening of a campaign, lastly (on the 
very day that closed the debate at the Jacobins) the 
threat launched against Leopold by the Assembly — all 
these had established the platform upon which the agita- 
tion for immediate hostilities rose. Throughout so rapid 
and constructive a change Kobespierre had remained 
immovable, repeating in his last protest the spirit and the 
very phrases of his first. Yet throughout the two months 
he had been politic in the extreme : watching his 
audience, even in the chair yielding to rebuke, and by a 
quality that was inherent to a character that never left 
his mind, avoiding every personal encounter and- every 
reproach of private malice. 

Now because men of Kobespierre's temper are so 
rare, or perhaps because they so rarely achieve power, 
his story in February and March 1792 has misinterpreted 
him before history. It makes him seem absorbed in a 
personal quarrel, and, despairing of his political am- 
bition, wasting himself in an attack against the chief of 
his conquerors. Brissot was politically at the head of 
the movement for war ; Brissot was the link that bound 
the republicans of the salons to the new band of young 
orators from the Gironde ; Brissot was to make the 
ministry that declared hostilities against Austria. When 
therefore it is seen how Robespierre follows him per- 
sistently, like an enemy, and when Brissot in turn is 
seen watching Robespierre as the chief opponent of his 
plans, there is read into this antagonism a common 
quarrel of disappointed vanity jealous of success. The 
reading is erroneous. It would link up the past of 
Robespierre and his future, both evidently those of a 
man lost in abstractions, by a very real and living 
interest : it leads his biographers into a dozen incon- 
sistencies ; and especially distorts the judgment of 



1 66 ROBESPIERRE 

Michelet, who has to present in 1792 a little morose 
offended figure full of bitterness against the Gironde, 
and fixed wholly against their chief as a personal enemy 
and yet in 1793 defending them from death, in 1794 
so removed from actuality as to fall before a conspiracy 
whose persons his political ideal forbade him to attack. 
Robespierre's struggle with Brissot, which is the con- 
temporary commentary upon the declaration of war and 
which interprets as it originates the fatal division of 
1793, stands congruous with the character and circum- 
stances of both men, and is capable of being presented as 
an explanation of their future fortunes. 

Close on forty, short, lean, stooping a little in his 
rapid gait, intelligent, over-active, Brissot had travelled, 
heard, seen, read widely and become divided during this 
great movement that was so well suited to his varied 
if restricted powers, between the absorbing interest of 
political intrigue and the defence of those principles to 
which he was sincerely attached. All that ennobles 
youth, the resistance to circumstance, the persistent 
following of a high ideal, the refusal to abandon personal 
restraint and dignity in the stress of poverty, had been 
absent from his past. Born somewhere of some one in 
the dull Beauce, coming to Paris a famished boy-lawyer, 
he had parried off starvation with a supple, too facile and 
somewhat unscrupulous pen, a bohemian sojourn in Eng- 
land, an abolitionist tour in the United States, a few 
weeks in the Bastille, had crammed him with every 
passing volatile or ignoble experience. He became one 
of those many to whom Orleans offered a disdainful pro- 
tection, had been married to one of the dependents of 
the Palais Royal and had entered the Revolution by its 
least reputable door. For all this slime of doubtful 
adventures and self-betraying journalism, he was well 
fitted for the Reform. He was devoted to and inspired by 
the omnipresent genius of Rousseau ; he could boast the 



THE WAR 167 

compliments of Voltaire ; lie had a sound judgment of 
men and of history ; he possessed to a very high degree 
that talent in the arrangement and mixing of characters, 
which is the menial and servile necessity of all effective 
parliamentary action. Ardently patriotic, a clear thinker 
and a framer of consistent policies, he erred in his 
appetite for intrigue. He had sold his reputation in 
youth for food, he never sold his principles for wealth. 
Now, when so much depended upon him, when he could 
overthrow and form a ministry and was even supposed 
to hold the patronage of the minor offices, his shiny 
black coat and little meagre apartment confessed a 
poverty above which he took no kind of pains to rise; 
for he was childless and satisfied with power alone. 
This man, whose description already accounts for half the 
antagonism which existed between him and the clear, 
vague Puritanism of Robespierre, widened the gulf be- 
tween his party and the extremists of the Mountain 
by in part supporting the superiority, and wholly direct- 
ing the power, of a social class in Paris which, as we shall 
see, established the dates and details of the war policy 
though it could not claim to have produced it. 

"^ All this upper-class Republicanism, later called the 
Gironde, was by nature opposed to that for which 
Robespierre stood in the Revolution and which just 
before his fall he imagined to have erected into the 
religion of an ideal state. It is true that he was vain 
and that the dream in which his mind held itself con- 
stantly remote from reality was full of his own image, 
prophet and seer of the new world. But it is not true 
that merely his offended vanity and the sight of others 
achieving power oppressed him. It was the idea, the 
colour of the gradual Girondin success that moved him to 
a ceaseless and vigilant opposition. Men of this kind, 
fanatical in conviction, unobservant of details, never fail 
to group in a common condemnation whatever different 



1 68 ROBESPIERRE 

things may be opposed to their ideal. They miss com- 
plexity ; and therefore Robespierre seeing so many forces 
at work, all apparently inimical to each other, yet all 
sinning against his fixed religion, took to imagining plots, 
conspiracies and secret alliances that had no existence. 
He was right indeed in his intuitive conviction that the 
Court was actively allied with Austria and sooner or later 
would force on the invasion by which it hoped to be 
saved. But he was utterly wrong in the imagination that 
Narbonne was but a masque for Lafayette and that all 
the varied mass of reaction lay beneath the leadership of 
the Gironde. I repeat, the quarrel was not personal upon 
Robespierre's side ; it was an attack on the whole social 
complexion of the Gironde. Desmoulins indeed, who was 
then Robespierre's man, rounded upon Brissot with a 
pamphlet whose awful wit ate like an acid for a year into 
the dominant party, undermined them and led them 
at last to the scaffold ; but the voice was Desmoulins' 
own. Robespierre in each of his frequent speeches was 
as innocent of personal attack as he was incapable of 
personal appreciation. 

It was by the following steps that Brissot saw 
approaching and helped to introduce the war. Within 
a fortnight of the close of the debate at the Jacobins, the 
alliance between Prussia and Austria was concluded : upon 
the 7 th of February. The Court knew it. The alliance 
was the work much more of Russia seeking a free hand 
in Poland than of Louis or his wife. It meant no imme- 
diate hostilities; on the contrary it contained clauses 
expressly framed for delay. The brother of Marie An- 
toinette was also the son of Marie-Th^rfese, and the tradi- 
tion of the Hapsburgs, the play of many strings whereby 
that family depend upon the dissensions of Europe as 
athletes upon their apparatus, was strong in the mind of 
Leopold. He had more interests to watch than the issue 
of the debates in Paris, and it was with a sincere desire to 



THE WAR 169 

temporise that, while sending a general in case the arch- 
bishopric should be attacked, he yet ordered the Elector 
of Treves '^ to disband the Smigr^s, But the alliance — 
the first definite act since Pilnitz — was signed; and the 
Court knew it. 

There was drawn up within the Tuileries, under 
the eye of the Queen, by the hand of Barnave,^ a 
document which could not but precipitate the quarrel. 
It origjinated the insolent series of domestic interference 
whose climax was to be the manifesto of the Duke of 
Brunswick, and whose intolerable pretensions roused the 
French to their ultimate successes. It travelled round 
by way of Brussels to Vienna, and was received again in 
Paris through the Austrian ambassador as though it had 
been the spontaneous expression of the Emperor. On 
the ist of March it was read to the Assembly; the Par- 
liament heard with indignation that Leopold saw fit to 
condemn the Jacobins as a " pernicious sect," and the 
capital was admitted to the private mind of foreigners 
upon its internal economy. While they were yet pre- 
serving an indignant silence to hear this Macedonian 
playing the steward in Greece, destiny had gone before 
intrigue, and Leopold was dead. 

In ten days Brissot had opposed to the haste and 
bigotry of Leopold's son a new and consolidated power. 
For it was upon the loth of March that he attacked, 
with the details and references of a prosecution, the 
King's foreign minister, Delessart. He was followed by 
the chief voice of his party, Vergniaud. 

Vergniaud's power ordinarily resided in a vibration 
of tone and a grave balance of words, but that day 
he recalled Mirabeau, and with the same gesture of 

* This ecclesiastic was a young man, genial, a glutton, and enormously 
fat. The door of his carriage was made of a special size to fit him. 

^ Madame de Stael, iii. 270. She had a better chance of knowing than 
any one. 



170 ROBESPIERRE 

menace tliat the dead man had thrown out in the 
Constituante, he branded the moment with a phrase. 
Beyond the windows of the Manege the palace was 
moving with men — they reached six thousand before 
the close of the struggle, and Murat was their type 
— a sword. Vergniaud called up mere words whose 
strength lay in their appeal to a populace that was half 
in arms. ..." Terror and a secret fear have come out 
often enough upon us from your doors ! to-day let them 
enter in. . , ." The Court yielded. Delessart abandoned 
his office; the fatuous Narbonne, whatever he may have 
meant to do, was relieved of power. By the Thursday 
of the next week the King had sent for a man already 
in his middle age, but whose dark hair, touched here and 
there with steel, whose vigorous, great eyebrows, rapid 
glance, and forward gesture of the arms betrayed Pro- 
vence and the cavalry. It was Dumouriez. 

The struggle of the lower nobility had forged and 
twisted him ; the Revolution released him as it re- 
leased so many of his peers to an active career, but 
could not free him as it did the younger men from 
the tortuous vices of egotism and cabals, the nemesis of 
privilege in the State. He might have led his brigade 
at thirty-five, his corps at forty. His face still carried 
the sword-cuts of a fine defence, unhorsed in the hussars, 
when the decline of old France was running through the 
seven years' war. He had great knowledge of soldiers, 
more of men. The curse that attaches at once to aristo- 
cratic and to arbitrary societies combined in the old 
regime to force him into the bypaths of secret diplo- 
macy. He had known the Bastille. Such subservience 
to fate had not soured his jolly temper nor dimmed his 
courage, but he had lost all conviction and had nothing 
left in him but ambition, a good heart, and a great irony. 
Out of this imperfection he became at last a traitor, but, 
alas ! that such a man should have dragged out an old 



THE WAR 171 

age in exile, got daubed with the bribes of Pitt, or have 
tried to rest in death out of his own soil between the 
hills and in the silence of the Thames. 

This man, not without patriotism and accepting the 
Revolution as a thing achieved, but bent especially upon 
personal success, reinforced the democracy at a charge. 
Upon the 19th of March,^ after but four days of hesi- 
tation he appeared at the Jacobins. 

The last few weeks had produced a symbolism that 
invariably accompanies political exaltation and whose 
methods savour to less active times of the grotesque 
or the insane. Dumouriez, most eager to accept in full 
a movement which he had never comprehended, fell 
to what must have been to him the most ridiculous of 
humiliations and stood up in the tribune with the red 
cap upon his head. The gulf that lay between Robes- 
pierre's single idea with its permanence and directness 
and the mixture of political intrigues that surrounded 
the Gironde was very apparent in what followed; for 
when Dumouriez had raised his hand as though to swear 
a new allegiance to the nation in its extreme necessity, 
and had met with the great wave of applause upon which 
he had calculated when he planned the stroke, Robes- 
pierre, precise and austere, took his place in the tribune. 
With the usual play of spectacles, fumbling and manu- 
script, in the usual weakness of tone and amid the usual 
enwrapping silence he read out his usual complaint. 

" He was delighted to see a minister at the Jacobins : 
he only hoped that the war — if it had to come — would 
be prosecuted as sincerely as they had heard promised. 
He was sorry to see that a member who had opposed the 
printing of Dumouriez' speech had been hissed. No one 
should be hissed in a free assembly. If Dumouriez was 
really a friend and protector of the popular movement, 
the Jacobins would support him ..." and so forth. 

^ And not the i6th, as he says in his " Memoirs." 



172 ROBESPIERRE 

The wliole was a web of generalities and platitudes, the 
underlying text that never appeared on the surface was a 
permanent suspicion of all the parliamentarians, Court, new 
ministers, salons, Brissots, generals and Feuillants lumped 
into one incongruous body in the speaker's mind. But it 
was not the speech itself that was the most characteristic 
part of his attitude, it was rather a little incident that 
marked his entry into the tribune. As he went up the 
steps some friend or other clapped the red cap upon his 
carefully powdered hair. Robespierre had, for once, a 
flash of anger : all it meant was hateful to him, disorder, 
delirium, the mania for war, the loss — as he feared — of 
his own leadership and of the method and creed which 
he worshipped far more than success. He flung the cap 
on the ground and left it there, and so opened his speech 
with restrained passion. 

A month passed between that night and the declara- 
tion of war. With every session of the Jacobins and with 
every act of the ministry during that time his peculiar 
isolation was emphasised. He went on his way preach- 
ing his eternal doctrine and in every speech and pamphlet 
reasserting one or all of his half-dozen dogmas. Also he 
thought that he had lost, but the Revolution was to 
show very soon the immense force of that persistence ; the 
defeats were to lift him, the disillusion of the Girondins 
under the stress of a shameful campaign was to enhance 
the reputation of their opponent and to recall his pro- 
phecies of evil ; within six months he was to be elected 
for the city with a kind of unanimity. But in these last 
days of March he could not get his speeches printed, 
sometimes they were hardly heard. 

On the 26th, in a famous speech upon nothing in 
particular, he had preached a personal God, and the 
phrase, " Providence, that arranges our destinies far 
better for us than we do for ourselves," had brought 
the passionate Guadet to his feet. He was full of 



THE WAR 173 

those things which found Robespierre intolerable : the 
encyclopaedia, common sense and the vivacity of the 
most cultured society in France, 

'* I have heard the name ' Providence ' continually 
throughout this speech ; and it seems to me I heard it 
said that Providence kept on saving the Revolution in 
spite of itself, I cannot understand a man like Robes- 
pierre countenancing superstition at this moment." 

Robespierre improvised a reply, not without elo- 
quence, but on the proposal to print this sermon and 
send it round to the affiliated societies, there was such 
a hubbub that no decision could be taken. 

On the 30th it was still worse. The renewed pro- 
posal to print provoked a renewed disturbance, and when 
the Bishop of Paris, from the chair, explained the drift of 
the speech and its religious value, Santhonax, near the 
door found the moment opportune to cry " No Monkish- 
ness," and the meeting ended in a huge noise. 

He did indeed guide the club still when his opinion 
was at one with the general feeling. When the soldiers 
of the Revolt at Nancy were liberated from their galleys 
and feasted in Paris as a symbol of the triumph of the 
Revolution, his protests against a delay in their reception 
were successful. His attack on Lafayette (put forth as 
was ever his habit, in that impersonal manner, " There is 
a general," &c., . . . ) was applauded and accepted. But 
as a leader throughout these last weeks of the peace, he 
stood more and more alone. He could not claim to con- 
trol the club. The tradition that had clothed him and 
that had made even a memory of the Constituante 
greater than the actual presence of the Legislative 
seemed failing in the flood of new names, in the high 
success of Vergniaud and his comrades, in the power 
of a Girondin ministry about to lead the novel temper 
of the people into a popular war. 

For Brissot ever at work to knit his schemes had 



174 ROBESPIERRE 

brought Dumouriez at evening to the Rolands, had made 
the old Stoic Minister of the Interior, and had found in 
that minister's young wife the soul of the new cabinet. 
For close upon a month a purely Girondin ministry had 
directed the vigorous policy of the nation, had summoned 
Austria to frank terms and had prepared — as it thought 
— the appeal to arms. Under such an influence one 
force after another melted from Robespierre, leaving 
him in his tenacity for peace, in his disdain for glory 
almost solitary. What saved him ? A personal 
popularity which all this change could not affect, the 
habit of thousands of silent, obscure democrats who 
knew nothing of the salons and for whom the Gironde 
had yet to be tested by success in the campaign, the 
fixity of his principles that formed the landmark of 
the drifting crowd — all these things attached to him. 
They were dormant for the moment in the cry for defence 
and armies; they were by no means paralysed, and 
Robespierre was wrong (as he ever was in his appreciation 
of men) when he now thought himself deserted. He 
abandoned the post of public prosecutor to which he had 
been elected. His brooding doubt and his bitterness at 
a future of loneliness and failure reached their climax 
with the advent of war. 

On the 19 th of April Dumouriez read in the 
Parliament the terms upon which Austria would con- 
sent to peace. The Princes of Alsace were to receive 
back all their feudal rights ; there were to be serfs 
again in France nor was any form of compensation 
to be tolerated. To the Pope, Avignon was to be re- 
stored ; to the French Crown, every lost function whereby 
it could "repress that which might cause anxiety to 
neighbouring states." Therefore on the morrow, in the 
crowded and silent hall of the Manage, Dumouriez 
triumphed and the King of France peering short-sightedly 
at his notes, read in a very ordinary voice his declaration 



THE WAR 175 

of war against the King of Hungary and Bohemia. The 
world was never again the same. 

Hitherto I have followed through this chapter the 
fortunes and opinions of a man whom Nature had not 
intended to be great, and to whom the accident of the 
Revolution had as yet given nothing but a steadfast, 
brilliant, and fictitious popularity. I have shut out the 
general picture by standing within his closed mind, for it 
has been my task not to present the immense travail of 
that new world, but to consider one only of those whom 
it affected, one in whom it did not see itself reflected, 
and whom it in no way inspired with its profound energy. 

But here, as I have written the word War, the insigni- 
ficance of such a theme appals me, and I see that not even 
the truth about this one individual can be made plain 
unless some glimpse of that portentous background is 
admitted to the scene. For to write of Robespierre's 
suggestive monotone, and in so writing to stumble upon 
that great debate into which there entered, and still enter, 
all the powers of the world; which forms our modern 
legend, and from which we nations derive our blood and 
pride, as families once did theirs from the Carlovingian 
memory, is like sitting up in a darkened room throughout 
the night upon some exact calculation, and at last to look 
up by chance and see through the shutters that it is 
dawn. Then one abandons for a moment the ceaseless 
labour of mechanical details, and throws open the windows 
to the air and the day. Beneath the house a falling lawn 
discovers all the country-side, and the eye rests upon life 
everywhere growing and awakening : this infinity is framed 
rather than bounded by the amplitude of the horizon. 

I turn, then, from the consideration of the enigma 
whose solution is the matter of this book, to recall the 
magnitude and complexity of the new forces that created 
the Republic. 

L 



176 ROBESPIERRE 

From tlie death of Mirabeau, through the flight of 
the King on to the massacre of the Champ de Mars 
and the Declaration of Pilnitz, the ancient forms of 
French life, though upon the eve of extinction, were 
yet maintained ; by which I do not mean that the titles 
of the noblesse, or even the " de," were heard, nor that 
lethargy still possessed the mass of the nation, but that 
the indifference of the upper classes to religion, com- 
bined with a concern for its establishment, the ineradicable 
habit of monarchy (where monarchy had been real), the 
sullen hesitation of the peasants, and the natural division 
between foreign and domestic affairs were the limits that 
bounded the mind of France. 

There was, however, latent, and as yet but potential, 
beneath the ruined shell of society a spirit which in art, 
arms, and politics drew from the very centres of life. It 
was a thing not meant for daylight; it was the energy 
which all sane institutions work to control, and to which 
tradition gives laws and limitations ; for it is as destructive 
as the elemental fire, and no one can look on it and live. 
This primal spirit breaks down all the varied incon- 
sequence of matter, it attempts to create from the begin- 
ning like a god, and, like a god wrestling with matter, it 
accomplishes imperfectly and with infinite pains and 
terrors its task of forcing a mind into the dead chaos of 
things. This spirit, which no one has yet named, though 
its spark lies at the base of all existence, sometimes pierces 
dangerously through for a moment to purge the world. It 
was so with Islam, and it was so with the revolutionary 
wars. The accident that lifted from it its immemorial 
blindness was the friction of '92. For there is set to the 
mind of man a boundary of endurance which may be com- 
pared to that degree of heat at which the atoms of a sub- 
stance change their relation to each other, and produce 
new forms through violence. If that boundary be passed, 
the common stuff of the mind takes on a form in which 



THE WAR 177 

exist all heroisms, and the lyric and madness also. The 
threat to internal liberty, the dread of a vast disappoint- 
ment, the incubation of the quarrel between the citizen 
and the religion of the citizen, the buying of the Church 
lands, the maturity of reaction — all these irritants received 
an intolerable accession from the menace of foreign inter- 
ference, and from the discovery in the dull mass of the 
new Parliament of that Force of the Word which was 
called the Gironde. By patriotism and by anger the 
whole nation received as a mission what had been 
but a civic concern. Men began to take the things 
of waking as we do those of dreams; there was in all 
they did a colour of vision ; its extravagance, its 
mixture of incongruous things, its awful spell, driving 
the mind; its power to achieve. From this proceed 
the large cadences of Yergniaud, the frenzy or pro- 
phecy of Isnard, the folly of red caps and pikes — but 
there is one example that sums up all : Eouget de Lisle, 
a mile from the Rhine, in the last hours of peace coming 
into that crowded dinner and singing with the daughters 
of Dietrich his new song; for the Marseillaise with its 
platitudes and its immortal phrases set to such a kind of 
tune is the whole of '92. 

What followed all the world knows. How every 
question was asked and answered in two years, and how 
the force for such a work proceeded from the open furnace 
of the Terror. I must return to the story. The purpose 
of the digression with which I have delayed it is to show 
that Robespierre — since it is upon that slight and con- 
stant figure that I must remain — stands out hencefor- 
ward a black outline against a conflagration. Not he, but 
some fantastic shadow of him, is cast outward from the 
flame and broadens ; as the fire first exaggerated, so the 
fury of its highest glow transfigured, and at last its fall 
consumed him. 

The first months of the war are an embroglio whose 

21 



178 ROBESPIERRE 

complex elements must be separately seized if one is to 
understand the various angers tliat united to discover a 
simple and violent solution in ttie insurrection of the 
loth of August. In these eddies Robespierre appears 
now from one aspect, now from another — not because 
their movement caught him but, on the contrary, 
because he stood fixed and apart, now seeming a butt, 
now remembered as a true prophet, now half a leader, 
and at last overwhelmed and hidden by the rush of 
action. The physical battle over, he reappeared with all 
his popularity intact. 

The factors of the situation were these. The King 
was powerful : it is the neglect of that elementary truth 
which vitiates half the French and nearly all the foreign 
histories of the period. He had suffered what was for 
royalty insult, especially from the Parliament, and since 
we know that he was to fall, the inevitable error whereby 
historians read their own acquaintance with the future 
into the minds of contemporaries makes us exaggerate 
his difficulties in the spring of 1792. He could and did 
exercise his veto, and that when the public opinion most 
resented it. The whole administrative system and the 
whole hierarchy of the regular army centred in his hands, 
and that centralisation was far from being a fiction in a 
country which had grown increasingly familiar with 
bureaucracy for six generations. No disposition of 
troops could be made, no general orders could be issued 
without his acquiescence, nor, commonly, apart from 
his initiative, and he possessed under his immediate 
orders and with a security in their discipline and de- 
votion, the only regular troops and the only men who had 
seen service in the capital : in number close upon four 
thousand men, whom the royalists of the militia could 
readily bring up to a full six. 

Dependent upon this power of the King and trust- 
ing in its maintenance were these two forces: the 



THE WAR 179 

general officers in active command — especially Lafayette : 
Dumouriez at the Foreign Office, a man whose energy 
and initiative were the only true forces in the whole 
ministry. 

Lafayette was a soldier, he knew the rottenness of the 
old army and the softness of the new ; he had a detesta- 
tion and, at that moment, a legitimate dread of anarchy; 
his abstract principles were all for a constitutional mon- 
archy, his personal emotions (which are in such men far 
more powerful than any theories) had turned to a fine 
loyalty and human affection for the royal family ; nor is 
it unjust to add that a certain bitterness at the way his 
popularity had melted and the Revolution escaped him 
coloured, though it did not direct, his attitude in this 
crisis. By one of those complications that differentiate 
history from constructed fiction, the Queen, who was 
the soul of the Court and whom he was chiefly bent 
on saving, detested him, and would rather have been saved 
by a plaster Narbonne or the living devil of the Jacobins 

In Dumouriez two elements met : the dominant factor 
was personal ambition — for it to be said that he had 
made and led the great war of the Revolution, and been 
the master of its success; the secondary factor was a 
regard for the society he had known with its salons, its 
king and its diplomacy, as the only thing possible in 
France. For such a man the spirit '93 was to seem an in- 
comprehensible welter, the first rising of it in the insurrec- 
tion of '92 a muddling catastrophe. Both these men then 
depended in different ways, for their repelling of the in- 
vaders, on the power of the King, while the King and his 
Court desired nothing so much as the success of the 
foreign armies and their rapid arrival before the capital. 
So much for the Tuileries. 

In opposition to the palace, the Assembly over whom 
Brissot's lobbying and the young oratory of the Gironde 
had now an absolute mastery desired merely an en- 



i8o ROBESPIERRE 

thusiastic crusade: a cavalry charge. From the ranks 
of their supporters, from the salon of Madame Roland 
and the coterie of the Patriote Frangais, the ministry had 
been drawn. But they could not forget that though it 
was the " Girondin ministry " its head and by far its 
most powerful man was Dumouriez whom indeed they 
supported right on into the Republic, but whom they 
knew well to have little in common with that clear 
enthusiastic religion of theirs that put for the goal of 
its armies the vision of a free world. These Stoics felt 
upon their flank a force that hampered and exasperated 
them as they bent their energies against the Court ; that 
force was the popularity of men outside their society and 
their philosophy, the unreason of the populace, the over- 
reason of the mob's preachers, the violence of Paris and 
especially that instinctive, inarticulate determination to 
keep the nation one and disciplined — a determination 
odious to their creed of local autonomy. Because this 
determination was most evident in the great system 
which the thousand societies of Jacobins had thrown over 
France and which they directed from the Rue St. Honor^ 
and because that coldness and over-reason of the popular 
critics (with its opposition to the war and its everlasting 
suspicion of parliamentary methods) was personified in 
Robespierre, therefore they marked out the nucleus 
of the Jacobins (of which club they were all members 
and whose majority they still affected) as an enemy, 
and especially they besieged the person of Robespierre. 
Such were the Gu-ondins, and to them a successful war 
was a necessity — and a thing taken for granted. 

To the third party in this triangular struggle a 
special attention is required, for it is the heir of the 
future of the Revolution and the habitat of my subject. 
The town of Paris, eager, querulous, direct, and boiling 
with ill-ordered passions; national but full of a local 
pride, extreme in democracy, careless of death, deter- 



THE WAR i8i 

mined to be the gaoler or the executioner of treason, has 
through fifteen hundred years slowly realised the French 
people. There was not as yet, in the early summer 
of 1792, an expressed or conscious Parisian will to be 
master of the Parliament or to inform the whole State, 
but the city was clearly a magnet to the revolutionary 
genius of the provinces and the centre of its expression 
in speech and writing. Already its idol had been made 
a god of in the Artois, soon its mandatories were to be 
the merciful tyrants of Lyons or the butchers of Nantes. 
Of this Paris the club of the Cordeliers with Danton for 
its leader were already the arms and the lungs ; that hard 
minority of the Jacobins that gave the club all its spirit, 
was the brain ; and the name continually on the lips of 
the street was that of the voice of the Jacobin theory, the 
interminable and inflexible monotony, Robespierre. He 
stood like a ritual, a perpetual solace of repetition to 
those who believed. Thus, while the natural division 
would seem to lie between the Court and the two liberal 
parties of Girondin and Jacobin, to these last the 
Girondins were confounded with the Court, and beyond 
the gulf stood Robespierre and his pure faith denouncing 
intrigue. 

It is not wonderful then that, as the opening of a 
campaign is marked by an immediate assault on the 
first lines of defence to clear the road, so the Girondins, in 
the necessity of preparing public opinion for the struggle, 
made a charge upon the position of Robespierre, who 
had opposed the war, and would still oppose a crusade. 
Within a week after the declaration of hostilities, on 
Wednesday, the 25th of April, the attack upon Robes- 
pierre was made and failed. 

It was able and thorough ; all the voting power 
that Brissot could still command mustered in the 
club. He himself, for a full two hours, broke down, 
so far as argument could, the imaginary denuncia- 



1 82 ROBESPIERRE 

tions of his enemy. His common sense, his know- 
ledge of books and languages, his travels were his 
allies. He assailed Robespierre's mere leadership of 
opinion : " What have you done ? What are you in the 
Revolution ? " Robespierre's perpetual fear of arms and 
of dictators he justly ridiculed, and in a passage that 
should be, but is not, famous, he exposed, as was done 
but rarely in that time, the absurdity of current historical 
parallels. Robespierre had thought Lafayette a Cromwell, 
a pink and white Cromwell with a weak nose. 

" Those who see a Cromwell in Lafayette," said 
Brissot, " know neither their country, nor the time 
they live in, nor Cromwell, nor Lafayette. It needs a 
certain force of, character to become a Lord Pro- 
tector. . . ." 

He attacked the whole Robespierrean scheme of sus- 
picion, the underground intrigues, the supposed alliance 
between the Court and himself, Brissot. He did it with 
evidence, documents, and personal asseveration. He 
demanded some shadow of proof for these ceaseless 
accusations. All right reason was on his side, and yet 
history has justified Robespierre's intuition upon the 
main point. The Court was betraying, and all those 
who maintained its generals were unconsciously (he 
thought consciously) leading the nation to disaster. 

Throughout Brissot's long speech cries and interrup- 
tions had disturbed him. In its first part, Desmoulins 
had called out " Scoundrel " very loud and frequently ; 
in its second the public galleries interfered. At its 
close, Robespierre went straight to the steps of the 
tribune. He was not in the list of speakers ; he claimed 
a point of order. Guadet, who was down to speak, sup- 
planted him, and in a speech far more passionate and 
far less reasoned than Brissot's, yet touched a quicker 
nerve ; for he spoke of " the love of the people " and 
of the danger of idols. He proposed that Robespierre 



THE WAR 183 

should withdraw from public life. He was a cause of 
dissension in the club and in the city, and his ceaseless 
denunciations disturbed the machinery of the democratic 
advance. 

That such a speech should exasperate the public 
galleries was natural, it was more significant of the times 
that the club itself joined in the tumult. Hats in the 
air and cries disturbed Guadet and inflamed him, Robes- 
pierre with the Puritan in him at an icy boiling point 
begged his friends to be silent. 

"All men have a right to a public hearing. More- 
over, these cries prevent me catching the accusations 
made against me. I shall take all interruptions as the 
acts of men who wish me ill." He stood up in his 
place to say this, and turned to the galleries. 

They gave him his silence, and when Guadet, who 
felt that Brissot and he had lost, came down from the 
tribune, Robespierre, in one of those rare improvisations 
that revealed him, used, in addition to his perpetual 
habit of hard moderation in tone the weapon of irony 
that he had played with in his youth, but that the 
sincerity and preaching of his public career had forgotten. 

" Do you not see," he began, leaning humbly towards 
his enemies and speaking constrainedly and coldly, " that 
if I were to retire it would argue vanity ? Why then I 
should be posing and I should seem a great man, whereas 
M. Brissot alone has the right to establish men by cate- 
gories. Nor do I see the effect my retirement would 
have since I have no places in my gift, and no talent 
for parliamentary combinations." 

It was eleven, and the club hated late hours; they 
cheered him and streamed out, leaving one, Simond, to 
hold forth till close on midnight to sleepy votaries. On 
the next day but one, the Friday, his victory was com- 
plete. With Danton in the chair, they voted the printing 
of his defence, sent it to the affiliated societies, and 



1 84 ROBESPIERRE 

left on record their condemnation of Brissot and 
Guadet. 

To that domestic check fate was about to add a blow 
far more decisive, a blow that silenced party for a moment, 
and, while it further undermined Gironde, raised Robes- 
pierre in the estimation even of close observers, yet 
united all the national parties against the Court. For 
it was on the next day, Saturday, the 28 th, that Theobald 
Dillon's fifteen hundred met the first fire of the war and 
were struck with panic ; in the disorderly flight of these 
recruits their general was massacred. 

Whether, as Dumouriez hints, the ambuscade was the 
direct result of Court treason, or whether (as was more 
likely from the character of the Irishman that led them) 
an over-confidence in such troops had produced the dis- 
aster, it is certain that the army as a whole was quite 
unfitted for war. Enthusiasm distorts. The burning 
levies had no conception of that hard truth by which 
military strength lies more than half in military habit and 
unreasoning obedience. Peasants snatched into the ranks 
displayed the pitiful simplicity that has added a note of 
farce to these tragedies — those Picards of Qui^vrain, for in- 
stance, who being for the first time under fire leapt from 
their ditch, waved their hats and shrieked in their patois, 
" For God's sake, gentlemen, take care ; there are people 
here where you are shooting." Everywhere, also, politics 
had disturbed the armies, and insujBficient equipment, 
detachments of insufficient strength (for political generals 
have two fronts to think of and keep their armies to- 
gether, while bad discipline is afraid of large separate 
posts) ruined such general plans as Dumouriez may 
have issued to the forces. One force pushed up the 
gorge of the Ardennes to Givet, which is the salient 
angle of the French against the Netherlands. There 
it stood still, unable to gather more than 10,000 men. 
The foreign mercenaries obeyed their officers and boldly 



THE WAR 185 

deserted in formation — as tlie Royal AUemand. Else- 
where the officers went over to the 4migr6s, their French 
soldiers refusing to follow. As at Bercheny where they 
carried off the colours, which a certain sergeant observing, 
he was so angry that he galloped after his deserting 
superiors and boldly wrested away the standard from a 
young ensign that was trotting at the tail. With these 
he returned to the loyal camp, and his regiment still 
preserves them. Worst of all, the army of the centre 
that might at any moment have marched to reinforce 
the north stood still, partly because the men were of poor 
training, partly because their plan had been to hold all 
the frontier from the Vosges to the Ardennes, but mainly 
because Lafayette who commanded them had his face 
turned towards Paris, and was determined not so much 
upon the campaign as upon saving the King. 

The news of all this breakdown came upon the city 
in May. Upon the first of the month came the rumour 
of Dillon's disaster and death. Next day the defeat of 
Biron. Then the Austrian occupation of Guienne. At 
that moment, had the armies of the eighteenth century 
been in the habit of silent preparation and had the allies 
preserved a larger and mobile force on the north-east, 
nothing could have saved the Revolution. The Court 
took on a different air, there was a brilliance and gaiety 
in it that recalled Versailles. That large neutral and inar- 
ticulate minority of opinion in Paris, a minority that still 
lay in the rut of habit and desired repose, was willing to 
support the Crown ; it hoped in some vague way that the 
failure of this Girondin war would bring them back strong 
government and security without a national humiliation. 
Reactionary groups partly controlled the streets. 

The Assembly and the Girondin ministry that still 
hung on to power and had not yet openly quarrelled with 
their master, Dumouriez, were vigorous in decrees. The 
exile or transportation of the non-juring priests was 



1 86 ROBESPIERRE 

passed : it was ordered tliat the King should dismiss that 
great guard, part of which the law allowed him, part of 
which he had gathered in spite of it ; finally, with the 
new month, on the 8 th of June the ParHament called 
upon the provincial cantons (that sent delegates to the 
annual Federation a month later) to furnish each five 
men in arms, and these they proposed to establish and 
train in a great camp of 20,000 men under Paris; some 
said to furnish the frontier, some to watch the King. 

The King consented to dismiss his guard. Indeed the 
measure was purely verbal. The Guard ceased to exist as 
a corporate body, but its members were lodged near the 
palace in private houses, while the nucleus of trained 
mercenaries, the Swiss, were sent into barracks a short 
march from Paris, at Kueil, not ten miles along the best 
of roads. 

Upon the edict against the insurrectionary priests, 
however, and upon the formation of the camp of 20,000 
he put an uncompromising veto, and would not be shaken, 
so strong was the Court at this moment. On the 13 th, 
Dumouriez having taken sides with the King, poor old 
Roland was driven to protest against him, with the 
result that the Girondin ministry found itself suddenly 
dismissed, and Dumouriez, who had thought to be the 
master of the moment by his defection — who had, 
indeed, been named minister of war — discovered the 
Court to be more subtle and stronger than he was; 
within two days he had fallen from power and gone off to 
command the disorganised forces in the north. 

There followed one of those great scenes of the 
Revolution, the vastness of whose moving crowds and 
the sense of whose force and tide has formed a prin- 
cipal picture for historians. The mobs of the east of 
the city, of St. Marceau and of St. Antoine, grumbled 
for seven days, fell under their accustomed leaders, and, 
with some vague object of menacing or witnessing the 



THE WAR 187 

King, with a memory also tliat it was the anniversary of 
the Tennis Court, they made the 20th of June. They 
poured before the startled Assembly, occupied the palace 
with a noisy and terrifying good-humour, saw Louis wear 
the red cap, and melted back into the unorganised im- 
potence of numbers. They had rehearsed an insurrection 
and had done nothing ; for no one was quite sure of what 
the Court might intend. 

In the Jacobins the climax of the dismissal of the 
ministry and the final isolation of the Court had somewhat 
calmed the ceaseless quarrel between the Girondins and 
Robespierre. The lull that followed the first disasters of 
the war left him far more secure than he had been even 
after his victory against Guadet and Brissot. He had 
proved to be the great adviser, the seer. The role suited 
him too well to be abandoned for revenge or triumph ; he 
continued to advise on his unwavering line — it did not 
affect him that this line coincided for the moment with 
what the anger and disappointment of the Girondins 
desired. 

Upon one matter indeed he stood somewhat apart, 
rather in silence than in the expression of his undoubted 
contempt; I mean upon the insurrection of the 20th of 
June. To the Girondins, with whom the revolutionary 
anger was a kind of goddess, this insurrection seemed 
a good thing, a reply at once to the Court and to the 
pedants, a proof of the new vigour with which the people 
meant by force of arms to defend the full reform, but 
to Robespierre it was doubly odious : as anarchy and 
as a handle for the Court. Also, later, he made it an 
accusation against Petion that the Mayor of Paris had 
believed himself the author of the insurrection. For 
the rest, Robespierre concentrated now, as the Girondins 
did, against Lafayette. 

Lafayette had sent an open letter to Paris — a letter 
that had half made the Revolt in protest. A week after 



1 88 ROBESPIERRE 

that day he appeared at the bar of the Assembly and had 
the inconceivable folly to counsel and patronise the French, 
advising them to a national resistance when their great 
blame of him lay in his inattention to that national r^ist- 
ance. He talked like the Austrian, dragging in the 
" Jacobin Faction " and echoing Leopold's letter of the 
winter. In this he ruined himself and his vague consti- 
tutional-loyalist-aristocrat-middle-class cause. The Court 
was far too strong to need him, the Revolution suspected 
him, the Jacobins determined to destroy him. A farcical 
review on the terrace of a hundred men who were to 
save the State, then next day of a ragged thirty, a return 
to his command, an attempt at civil war, finally an 
interrupted flight after the loth of August and the fall 
of the throne, ended in Austrian prisons the revolutionary 
career of the most patriotic, liberal, vain, sincere, and 
courageous noodle that ever boasted quarterings or gloried 
in constitutions and top-boots. 

Robespierre's two attacks upon that general took the 
form of huge literary compositions, the second of some 
merit, and containing at least this phrase : " You intrigue 
and intrigue and intrigue. You are of the calibre of 
a palace revolution. It is beyond your strength to 
interrupt the revolution of a world." 

This speech marks the last moment in which he can 
be watched or can count as an influence upon the fall of 
the monarchy. To repeat a phrase I have already used 
in this chapter, action overwhelmed him, and he dis- 
appeared submerged. The receding flood found him, in 
that totally new world which the i oth of August made, 
still standing, more than ever an idol, repeating the same 
ritual, and destined to ' be the first elected deputy of the 
capital. 

The I oth of August was Danton, and I give the 
story of it in another place. It was a supreme action, 
and Robespierre was so much the negation of action that 



THE WAR 189 

the presentation of that battle is utterly incongruous to 
an analysis of his career. He did not fly or hide or 
withdraw, but he escaped its influence altogether, and 
the one thing we know of him in the clear and dreadful 
night that Lucille Desraoulins suffered and described 
and that her husband and his friends filled with arms, is 
that he sat at home in the noise of the tocsin, very 
impassive in face of Barbaroux, or any other violent man ; 
and then next day, not six hours after the final victory 
of the people, made a good literary speech at the 
Jacobins, in which he very calmly advised the new 
powers to do all those vigorous new things upon which 
they had already determined. 

But I would not leave that prodigious event from 
which proceed the power and confidence of European 
democracy and whose success was also that of our new 
anxious world without noticing two things. First, the 
date on which the King may first be counted as definitely 
in arms against the capital ; secondly, the appearance 
that the disturbance took on for a casual and accurate 
contemporary, whose curious and almost unknown account 
happens to have survived. 

The decisive moment is surely the iith of July, 
a month before the insurrection. Vergniaud's speech 
of the 3rd had summed up the case against the King. 
Lamourette's empty concord of the 7 th had but empha- 
sised its own vanity, for that same day the King's 
friends, the Department of Paris, had dismissed the 
mayor, Petion, saying that he had made the insurrection 
of the 20th of June. But it was on the i ith that the 
Parliament issued its public appeal to the nation, and 
declared the " Peril of the Commonwealth," and it is 
from this day that Louis weakens politically, strengthens 
himself militarily. On the 12th his confirmation of 
Potion's dismissal begins the universal exasperation. On 
the 1 3 th he submits to the decree of the Assembly rein- 



I90 ROBESPIERRE 

stating Potion. It was his first great check. The 14th he 
hears the violent sadness of the Federation, and if it be 
urged that it was principally the insolent Declaration of 
Brunswick that launched the Revolt (which is true), and 
that the arrival of the Marseillais and their guns made it 
possible, it is still more noteworthy that on the 23rd, two 
days before Brunswick signed his mad draft, and five 
before it was known in Paris, the Federations running 
up from every part of France had all demanded the 
deposal of the King. 

It is certainly at this moment that France moves. 
The King had been the King ; now he begins to be a 
fortress for the invader held from within. Though no one 
dared call for the name of a Republic, the thing sprang 
out alive. " Not only the towns but the peasants," or 
(as we should put it in England), " not only the middle 
classes but the slums," understood the danger which the 
parliament in the teeth of the Court had declared to be 
public and imminent. A little too late for her immediate 
purpose, early enough for honour, and sufficiently, in the 
end, to conquer Europe, France at last really armed. It 
was not only that the volunteers flocked in, it was also 
that most men then began to stand ready in their mind 
for death. An infinite reserve for resistance was created 
by the soul of France. 

As for the second point, the effect and description of 
the day of the Revolt, it is drawn from the letter which a 
genial bourgeois kind of a fellow, one Azema,^ Member for 
the Aude, sent to his constituents, taking for his text that 
admirable, admirable proverb of the Languedoc, Mai usa 
ne pot dura. 

It was two in the morning, yet the anxious Assembly 
was still in session under the thousand candles in the 
vast oval of the Manage. Az(^ma wearied and walked out 

^ The letter is unpublished, but may be found quoted in the Rivolution 
FranQaiae for August 1894. 



THE WAR 191 

into the night. The long roll of drums by which the 
French introduce action, " the gen^rale," began to sound 
far off from the guard-rooms of the section, and the 
tocsin swung in all the belfries, but the streets were 
empty, and the noise echoed up into a clear air with 
stars. So many were watching on that night that all 
the windows seemed lit as with an illumination, and under 
the oppression of this unnatural loneliness and of all those 
eyes expecting morning, he came back again to his seat 
in the hall. 

At six o'clock the Assembly suspended its sitting, and 
he went out northward by the Feuillant Door. Up the 
street, in what is now the Place Vendome, he saw guns 
massed ; erect and silent gunners. He turned back, past 
the palace — there was no one in the square. Within, 
the royal garrison was at review. He reached the river 
and walked on eastward to the Hotel de Ville, where the 
insurrectionary Commune sat poising its blow. The Place 
de Greve was empty. Then back again westward by the 
Halles, and everywhere he passed through lonely streets 
to the noise of the bells. As it neared seven o'clock 
small groups began to pass him, women among them. 
He drew near the wall to let a batch from Marseilles 
go by singing; they were dragging a couple of guns. 
By the time he reached the Feuillant Door again he saw 
a great mob gathered about it ; there was no entering. 
He went round westward to try the Capuchin Gate, and 
as he was struggling thither, the noise of the volleys 
came from the palace ; the mob roared and streamed 
back outward to the Tuileries. At last he entered the 
hall of the Parliament, and saw there, behind the grating 
of the reporters' box, the King and Queen and their 
children ; then he knew that the game was won. 

About him, two hundred of the seats were empty. 
The Assembly sat silent for a while, and outside the 
monotony of the loud battle was broken at last by the 



192 ROBESPIERRE 

louder clamour of the charge, and the palace admitted 
its great torrent of men. Twenty deputies, of whom he 
was one, were sent out to parley with the crowd ; they 
were swept by its pressure back and inwards from the 
Carrousel. They re-entered the Parliament and every 
one looked at his neighbour, listening to the guns. Then 
as the cannon passed up beneath their windows a threat 
or a savage exultation from without came in with the 
growing heat of the morning; fear dropped from them, 
the conquest, the dangers, the enemy marching on the 
city, the Republic born, ran through them with the 
August sunlight, and in one of those sudden actions that 
made the three Parliaments of Revolution like soldiers, 
they started up together and cried out repeatedly the 
name of the nation. Then the nation took the throne, 
the orb, and the lilies, and in the lodge behind the screen 
that veiled him, the face of the last king was blotted out. 
When it was evening Az^ma went out in the dark 
among the bearers and their lanterns and tried to count 
those that still lay dead in the courtyard and the gardens. 
There were lost in that short time and in that little 
space, more men than have-^ fallen in battle through- 
out this African war. 

^ Written in March 1901. In this I follow Aulard, who has read every- 
thing there is to read, and quotes 5000. Az(^ma, who saw only what 
remained after a whole day's work with the stretchers, gives a much lower 
figure. 



CHAPTER VI 

ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 

In the presence of such a recasting as that of the i oth 
of August a man is tempted to write not a chapter but a 
book. The time itself, grown used to a fundamental 
transformation, yet spoke of this new upheaval in 
whispers, calling it " Revolution." Open any memoir 
at random, read any speech of the succeeding autumn, 
and you will find this one thought running through 
them — a new basis of equilibrium had been discovered. 
Mai usa ne pot dura : the doubts and coverings of '91, 
the re-entrant agonies of early '92 had broken down as 
under a strain, and the real quarrel was ready to be 
threshed out — that is, the real truth had come up into 
the daylight. Shall I put it in one word? Terrible, 
perhaps, to our time and to the ears of moderns, but 
finally explicative of that catastrophe ? The " upper 
class" had gone. 

Hitherto the Revolution, working on a theory, meta- 
physical, preaching or postulating the dogma " equality," 
had had for its material those old divisions of society which 
not a century of persistent effort has appreciably weakened 
in Europe. Its leaders saw " the People " as worshippers 
see their God ; and they made an image of " the People " 
after their own image. One group was for excluding 
(and succeeded in excluding) the proletariat from the 
vote ; another claimed a full suffrage for " the People." 
In the chapel of the Jacobins night after night a vision 
of " the People " filled the darkness of the nave above 
the candles, haunted the remote and deserted chancel. 



194 ROBESPIERRE 

It inflamed a hundred orators, and inspired tlie noblest 
rhetoric of that tribune. But " the People " were not there ; 
doctors, lawyers, contractors, master carpenters, master 
masons, many young lords, and a few old livers ^ made up 
the audience to which could be thrown such golden 
enthusiasms. Peuple ce jour te fera eternel. 

The " People " had been a factor spoken of, admitted 
to exist — the First Clause of a Creed — but what it was 
they did not know any of them , till, on the i oth of 
August, the People appeared. Then the democrats 
were tested by fire, and it was seen which loved enough 
or believed enough to guide or serve or tolerate this 
great giant half awake and a child. For the People dis- 
covered what the leisure of the eighteenth century least 
expected in them, the epic song, ritual, the necessity for 
colours — even for the colour of blood. 

The King — all save his person and the new legend 
surrounding it — had disappeared in that victory ; but it 
was not only the King, very much more had disappeared. 
Consider why the Girondins had been able to establish 
their power in the year of the Legislative Assembly ; why 
the Jacobins, their enemies, had hesitated throughout 
and been divided, and pretended that the Kepublic was 
a silly name; why the Assembly had seemed doubtful 
on the critical day of the battle. It was because until 
the I oth of August Society lay stratified; after the loth 
of August the strata commingled. And the underlying 

^ Take any part of the list of members of the club at random ; take 
the letter "A." Under "A" there are but twenty-seven names, and in 
these twenty-seven I find a famous chemist (Adet), later a diplomat. 
The lieutenant-general of Poitou (Agier), a duke (Aiguillon), a hotel- 
keeper (Agier), a large merchant (Allart), an ambassador (Alguier), a 
famous surgeon and his brother (the two Andres), a well-known author 
and his brother (the Andrieux), a private gentleman of political ambitions 
(Anthoine), a marquis (Aoust), a provincial barrister (Armand), a large 
paper manufacturer (Arthur), the lieutenant-general of Aix and judge of 
the Court of Appeal (Audier), an officer (Aubriet), a wine merchant of 
Cognac (Augiet). 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 195 

bulk, a tiling hitherto spoken of in philosophic formula, 
feared as mobs, worshipped as a force, but neither touched 
and appreciated by the politicians, nor of itself organised 
for action — never a personality — now knocked at the gates, 
or rather entered as one living man enters and occupies 
his own place in arms. I shall show it later in the 
Municipal Council of '93. 

This conquering force was the more irresistible from 
the fact that for years the upper class had preached its 
right to govern, that from '89 the rhetoricians had taken 
the People for their base, and that latterly it had been 
flattered, appealed to, used against the Crown. So the 
Girondins, so the philosophy of the eighteenth century 
was determined to resurrect the People, to bring the mass 
articulate agaiu into the life of a great European nation ; 
see how that sudden plunge back into the level of nature 
shook the world. 

First there appeared what must always follow a 
sudden appeal to the popular voice : the reputations 
already made turned into watchwords and provoked 
enormous enthusiasms quite out of keeping with the 
value of the men they marked for honour. Secondly, 
and later, this too appeared : the primary instincts of the 
People, thrust into the petty debates of cultured men, 
produced divergencies and conflagrations. The gentry 
strained themselves to be worthy of the inner force that 
wells from below and supports societies in peril; they 
caught from the People the overwhelming influence of 
general passions that disturbs a horde, and they turned 
their debates into battles. 

The second effect was an open breach between the 
Mountain and the Gironde. The cause of this was the 
exaltation of whatever names had, by the agencies of the 
clubs, fixed themselves on the popular ear — and among 
these there was no name like Robespierre's. He was 
himself ready to admit the title that the People, turbu- 



196 ROBESPIERRE 



~^^^ 



lent, life-giving, offered to him who was uncreative, fixed 
in every convention of his frozen class. 

This sudden change in the nature of his progress 
Robespierre accepted with an ease that would be aston- 
ishing did we not know how much of the politician 
entered into and made flexible the methods of his fixed 
mind. He went over bodily to Paris and the new incar- 
nate populace ; moved with them at their pace, and (what 
was more remarkable) consented to accept not a few of 
their inconsistencies ; he was like a man afoot that finds his 
road end in a flooded river, and at once takes boat without 
inquiry, and welcomes the speed of the current. From 
the loth of August till his election on the 5 th of Sep- 
tember, from that to the first session of the Convention, a 
fortnight later, he plunges deep into Paris. 
^ Already before the i oth of August, there had been 

something like a determined plot to put him at the head 
of the movement ; Barbaroux had seen and despised him ; 
he had refused to make his room the headquarters of 
the Revolt. But now, afterwards, in spite of that refusal, 
Paris was determined upon Robespierre ; and the medium 
of government into which Paris thrust him was the Com- 
mune. For the Commune of Paris had become the brain 
of the Revolution — the Commune was to turn later 
(when the Republic had been declared and the Conven- 
tion launched), into its driving power. The men that 
had made the reform, the world that survived till early 
'92, had fallen, as it were, through a broken platform into 
an abyss. The discussions became futile. The Assembly 
could not govern. The Revolution was legal — it was 
even over-legal — but here was a fiction of legality which 
could not stand the common daylight. That these six 
hundred, who had but a few days since protected Lafay- 
ette, that hardly knew their own mind, that had never 
understood the disaster that threatened the Crown, should 
be left in control would have been something so counter 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 197 

to the common sense of the moment that even in the 
remoter provinces it would have stood for anarchy and 
for France open to the invader. The dying Legislative 
had but one function to fulfil : to register the decrees of 
whatever was for the moment the necessary usurper, the 
dictator. That dictator and usurper was the Commune. 
I know how monstrous this body appears to those 
who are unacquainted with the nature of France. I know 
that the voters who named it were called in haste, 
secretly, at night. I know that it sprang from a con- 
spiracy, and outstepped all the boundaries which the 
Revolution had hitherto laid down for itself. I know 
that by arithmetic and paper arguments one can show, 
if one chooses, that it was irresponsible and arbitrary ; a 
body of men that had captured the nation. But I say 
that a man who does not understand the hegemony of 
Paris, and who does not understand the rapid instinctive 
actions by which Paris determines each step in the 
development of the nation, is a man unfitted to deal 
with the history of France. He is like one who writes of 
England, not knowing that England has been, and still 
is, a country governed by one class; or like one that 
would analyse the conditions of Russia, not knowing how 
that sphinx lives by the interior life of an intense reli- 
gion. No body in France could pretend to government 
at that moment save the City, and whether from a 
minority or no, it was yet from the articulate, deter- 
mined, and representative part of Paris that the new, 
irregular Commune proceeded. The mass may not have 
voted — a great part were forbidden by law to vote, and 
for a great part the machinery of voting did not exist — 
but they were very willing to fight under the orders and to 
accept the voice of the new irregular Commune as though 
it were that of the people. It was the Commune that had 
^attacked the palace, had organised the new militia, and 
had imposed its man, Danton, upon the ministry. The 



>.*> 



198 ROBESPIERRE 

Commune was therefore, in the month that lay between 
the fall of the Crown and the arrival of the Convention, 
the supreme power in France. 

Now, observe how in the heat of this miracle Robes- 
pierre stood impassive, and how, his determination or 
ambition helping, it was yet the tradition formed of him 
that pushed him into power. Two days after the loth 
of August — on Sunday, the 12th — he appeared at the 
session of the insurrectionary Commune. He was met 
with immediate and continued applause. Yet he had 
nothing to tell them save that they were " named by the 
people," which was not particularly true, and that " the 
wisdom of the people was watching over the safety of the 
country," whereas it was the very foil to wisdom, it was 
blind instinct that was doing it. At great length, utterly 
out of touch with the fever of the time, he developed 
his perpetual theme. The note had hardly changed since 
the time of buckled shoes and swords. Yet the Com- 
mune offered and offered itself to him. They sent him 
to be their spokesman before the Assembly. He accepted 
the task, and found himself presenting a petition that 
the old directory of the city should be discharged. In 
truth it was not a petition, it was an imperative com- 
mand. 

Robespierre, with his spectacles, his attitude of 
peering at the manuscript, read out a long defence 
of the new body, thoroughly argued upon legal grounds. 
He must have known that he was slipping from his 
absolutes : he was addressing a national parliament 
legally deputed and he was pleading for an irregular 
and illegal body that was in successful revolt. He 
excused himself to himself by this thought, that, but 
for the illegal Commune the absolute political justice 
he demanded could not have arrived. 

This deputation entrusted to his leadership is the 
first of the many evidences, great and small, of the 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 199 

place that was being thrust on him and of the way his 
contemporaries regarded him. 

When the new Commune struck a medal in com- 
memoration of the loth of August they were careful 
to send it first of all as a gift or a homage to Robespierre : 
to him that had sat in his little bare room thinking 
of nothing but the pure right while the people were 
fighting. So men bring food for idols, but at least this 
food is eaten by the priests. 

Around Robespierre at this moment there accumu- 
lated prints, medals, statuettes, congratulatory addresses, 
which he could do nothing but preserve and arrange, and 
which remained intact, a witness to the idolatry, when 
they were sold at auction to strangers after Thermidor. 

And here is another evidence of his forward move. 

The one thing that most decisively emphasised the 
power of the new Commune was that it, in theory a 
mere municipal body, undertook to form a tribunal to 
judge the treason of the Court. This usurpation of 
power is so illustrative of the power of tLa capital that 
all the extreme acts following the fall of the Crown,^ 
all the establishment of democracy absolute seem un- 
expressive beside it. It pretended to a kind of royal 
dignity, to be a fountain of justice or of vengeance. 
Had the Assembly retained a pulse of vitality it would 
have resisted such an act of sovereignty. So far frorc 
resenting it the Assembly was willing to decree, but a 
week after the fall of the palace,^ that a tribunal chosen 
by the city should be formed. It was even willing to 
allow the electors of Paris to name the members of that 
tribunal. It was willing to allow their meeting, voting, 

^ There was declared the same day, by the Commune at least, 
Universal Suffrage, and the Assembly ratified the vote on the morrow. 
They assumed immediate jurisdiction over all the buildings and prisons 
of the capital, protecting the Louvre, sending their victims to La Force. 
They put their own oflELcers at the gates. 

* On August 17. 



200 ROBESPIERRE 

and establishing tlieir right to judgment that very night 
in the great room of the town hall ; and when Paris had 
achieved its usurpation and the ballot was taken as to 
who should preside at the future trial of the royalists 
that had defended the palace, the first name to appear 
was that of Robespierre ; Robespierre who had not put 
himself forward as a candidate, who was unwilling .to 
take a part so active and so responsible, and who re- 
signed at once the dangerous office that had been pressed 
upon him. 

On the same day it was Robespierre who was sent 
to the mayor of the old and broken municipality, to 
his old comrade, Potion, to see whether some agreement 
could be come to between what had been the legal power 
in the town, and this new flaming insurrectionary thing. 
I will not believe that this moment determined the 
beginning of the quarrel bptween Potion and Robespierre. 
That quarrel was part of the general strain between the 
Mountain and the Gironde ; a necessary outcome of the 
divided temper which the Convention was to show. 
But it is typical of the way that Robespierre was pushed 
on upwards. He was an ensign before the advance of 
this new radical wedge that had come in to split France 
into the camps of '93, and to be driven by the hammer 
of the invasion permanently into the fabric of the 
country. 

As this fortune fell upon him, and as he yielded to 
its opportunity, the last dust of the old order crumbled. 
Lafayette fled from his command and was condemned 
by the Parliament that in its old freedom had absolved 
him. The department of the Somme whose executive 
had refused to admit the legality of the decrees of 
this new revolutionary Parisian government was broken 
by the subservient Assembly and sent before the new 
high court which the Commune itself had formed. 
Within a fortnight of the storming of the palace it 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 2oi 

was plainly evident that tlie Republic was born, and to 
Robespierre, I tbink, it was suggested that the perfect 
state lay in sight. This chance bound him to the city 
for ever, and the worship the city paid him thrust him 
on towards that function of ruler for which neither he 
nor others then knew his complete unfittedness. 

The 26th of August is the date round which these 
origins cling, for at that date the extreme danger of 
France became openly apparent. On that Sunday it 
was known that Longwy on the rock that overlooks the 
frontier had surrendered. On that Sunday (Vendue was 
firing the first shots) the Assembly decreed that every 
priest that had within a fortnight neither taken the oath 
nor voluntarily fled the country should be transported 
to the colonies. On that Sunday they decreed that any 
discussion of capitulation by any citizen in the frontier 
towns should be punished with death. They withdrew 
all weapons from those who would not volunteer for the 
frontier; they authorised that vast inquisition of arms 
throughout the capital which led to the registering, the 
imprisonment, and the public noting of the minority 
that had plotted against the nation. Not knowing what 
lightning the air held, they prepared the massacres of 
September. 

In the stroke of the invasion the Parliament seemed 
to remember for a moment that it needed no teaching, 
and was willing on its own account to borrow something 
of the energy of the times. Even Lamourette, a bishop 
and the author of the futile compromise of a few weeks 
before, found it possible to speak the language of the 
Revolution, deplored that some "had escaped from 
popular justice" on the loth of August, spoke of the 
unhappy, bewildered, imprisoned Hapsburg woman as 
" one still atrocious to the nation " ; called her what she 
would once have been had she dared, " the executioner 
of our country " ; and in general showed what exaltation 



202 ROBESPIERRE 

the mildest had caught in this new experience. He was 
a priest, and he was astonished and inflamed to find that 
God sometimes permits mere strength to threaten for a 
little while. A disciplined army, a thing that thought 
itself like steel, had passed the frontier and was on the 
straight road to Paris. 

On that same 26th of August began the elections 
for the new Parliament that was so soon to meet and in 
these the fortune of Robespierre remains still rising and 
constant. Paris named its primaries, elected an electoral 
college of a thousand, sent up in that great crowd the 
mass of names that stand for '93. Robespierre's own 
section, the Place Vendome, which (since the last fort- 
night had transformed even language) was called the 
" Place des Piques," elected him unanimously to the 
college, and elected him president of the primary as 
well. He was ill/ partly unable to attend ; his name was 
enough. Duplay was elected with him, and in the 
growing madness of that week Paris waited to hear the 
names of its members. 

On the eve of the massacres of September, one hesi- 
tates a little where to place this self-observing, undis- 
covered mind. I have continually remarked through- 
out this book how removed he was from the creative 
passions that surrounded him; how their product, the 
greatest drama of the world, passed by him as a tide 
slips under a mist. It is true of the joys and the gran- 
deurs ; it is true also of September. When the irregular 
committee (which, to the eternal hurt of his country, 
Marat inspired) had determined upon the massacres — for 
I believe they were so determined ^ — when Manuel had 

* He was so excused in the register of the Primary which Hamel saw 
before the war. I believe these records perished with so many others of 
the town archives in the destruction of the H6tel de Ville in 1871. 

^ The arguments I find in favour of the exclusive responsibility of 
Marat and his committee will be found on pp. 183-84 of my "Danton," 
and in Appendix iv. pp. 340-46 of the same book. 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 203 

announced to the Commune that Verdun was besieged ; 
when on that same Sunday, the 2nd of September, the 
chance orderly came^ running into the hall where they 
were meeting, and told them that the prisons were 
invaded, and that a massacre had begun, Kobespierre, 
nominally the leader, forced to be a leader by his con- 
temporaries, might as well not have existed. 

Michelet talks of his " diving down beneath the sur- 
face and disappearing " during those terrible three days. 
That sentence is the result of too imperfect a research. 
Eobespierre did not even hide. He was there, he sat 
in the Commune, he did what little work he could in the 
general attempt to prevent the horrible vengeance ; but 
as soon as there appeared a moment for action, all the 
inactive in his constitution plainly showed. 

One single thing remains of what he did : he was 
one of three that were sent to the Temple to see that no 
attack should be made upon the royal family. Even 
that was hardly an action, for there was no question of 
an attack ; the long band of tricolour tied all round the 
town wove a charm about it, and his journey was but a 
formal visit and return. 

All through those terrible three days it was the law 
that the elections should proceed. They proceeded as if 
Paris were not assuming her chief responsibility before 
history, and as though one of the great crimes that 
hamper nations in their passage through time were not 
threatening to restrict throughout a century and more the 
action of liberty. On Monday, the second day of the 
massacres, the electoral college met in the archbishop's 
palace. The hall was restricted for those thousand men ; 
they moved to the Jacobins. On the Wednesday when 
the last of violence was grumbling in the streets, 
they elected Robespierre, not with the unanimity that 
later saluted Danton, but by a strong majority, the first 



204 ROBESPIERRE 

deputy for Paris.^ It was the only decision of the 
day. 

It was therefore in the atmosphere, and surrounded 
by the effect of September, that he entered his Ke- 
public, and yet it is as a man pure from any reproach 
of September that history must regard him. Even con- 
temporary debate cleared him of a calumny so evidently 
incongruous to his character ; the process of research has 
put it beyond any question — ^he was not only innocent of 
the blood ; he was innocent even of comprehending that 
September had broken the ramparts of the new order, and 
had prepared the coalition of Europe. " See what comes 
to these people who dethrone kings ? They become 
possessed with devils." 

The elections of Paris were the final blow that struck 
apart for ever the Left (in which Robespierre mingled and 
which he was to lead) from the Gironde. 

On that quarrel hangs the future fortune of the 
Revolution. And I will therefore beg my reader to per- 
mit some analysis of its nature. Its origins have ap- 
peared more or less obscurely in my last chapter, because 
it was there necessary to enter into the confused details 
of Robespierre's public attitude. When the story of the 
personality is left aside for a moment, and the general 
field of '92 is regarded, the salient relief of the year is 
the contrast, and at last the opposition of the Gironde 
and the extreme Left. What was the grievance against 
the Gironde ? 

It is universally appreciated that men of a high 
political idealism find difficult or impossible the disci- 
pline necessary to prolonged common action in an 
assembly. Even when the issue is absolutely clear (as 
for instance when it is the defence or the independence of 

^ 338 to 187. There were nearly 400 abstentions, probably due to the 
fact that the great disturbance was not yet ended : 200 more voted at 
Danton's election the next day. 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 205 

one's country), the tendency of tlie mass to disintegrate 
is apparent ; when the main principle of common action 
has been achieved the disintegration appears to become 
a fatal necessity, and enthusiasts of this kind that are, as 
it were, picked infantry for a charge, lose the faculty for 
defending a position. 

The system of party does not rely for its motives, but 
depends for its bond upon the distribution of patronage. 
It is deepest rooted where a state is governed by its 
wealthy citizens ; throughout the world, the permanence, 
tradition, and organisation of the teams of public debate 
are strong in proportion to the magnitude of public sala- 
ries, and one might almost add to the unreality of the 
issues that are discussed. 

It stands to reason, therefore, that he who is pos- 
sessed of any political creed, or that has received a reve- 
lation of political justice, will be the worst of materials 
for the exercise of this base and necessary method of 
cohesion. Nor is this all. There is in such passionate 
convictions a potentiality of high differentiation, which is 
the despair of historical philosophy. The apostles, the 
reformers of every age of conviction, turn that age to a 
battlefield. It would seem as though the nearer one 
pushed up towards the central truth which inspires men 
with certitude, and puts their awful energy into the 
creeds, one got nearer also to the general paradox by 
which that central unity is itself the origin of all differ- 
ences, the creator of infinite tones and colours. Whether 
we are dealing with the irresistible advance of the 
Christian Church throughout its early development, or 
with the triumph of a political system (as in the case of 
the Revolution), or with a profound economic change, 
which may be the form of our next new development, 
the advance of such conquerors can never be like that of 
an army, but must always be like that of a tide ; eddy- 
ing, self-returning, appreciable only in the mass, and 



2o6 ROBESPIERRE 

out of such contradictions come the only enduring 
things. 

This tragic part of faith, that it impels the most 
violent energies into the smallest details of the creed is 
undoubtedly the underlying cause of the great quarrel 
which had first arisen in the debate on the war in De- 
cember and January, which had broken out openly when, 
in the spring, Robespierre and Brissot had made targets of 
each other in the Jacobins, and which this high moment of 
the Revolution forced into its final form compelling either 
faction to attempt the destruction of the other. 

Of the Gironde as the chiefs of the opposition the 
Mountain had been jealous ; in the Gironde as crusaders, 
the Mountain had seen contemptible fanatics — possibly 
allies of the Court. In the Gironde, political, and there- 
fore necessarily intriguing, working through boudoirs, 
and weaving cabals, the Mountain had discerned that 
impure element of compromise which from the very open- 
ing of the States-General the extreme Left had fought 
as their principal enemy. When they met in Madame 
Roland's room, Desmoulins and Robespierre knew how 
the chairs stood round ; they knew the footstool. They 
saw Barbaroux, Gensonne, Brissot, Guadet form a coterie 
ruling them and persuading France. 

I have said that Brissot and Robespierre were the 
two opposite types upon which we can fix to appreciate 
the acerbity of the struggle. You may also see it in 
the breach between the two comrades, Robespierre and 
Potion. It is developed and recognised when Danton, in 
the garden of the ministry on a famous day in August, 
drives Roland and Servain where he chooses like domes- 
tics. All that Girondin spirit had depended upon the 
unrealities of '92, the restricted suffrage, the uncertain 
power of the Court, the upper-class tradition of security, 
the upper-class illusions with regard to the nature of 
social discipline, and — if the word convention can be 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 207 

used, of minds so lofty and erect as those of Vergniaud, 
Potion, and Isnard — upon the upper-class convention that 
manners are in some part a chief component of political 
talent. 

The loth of August had brought all the realities of 
the inner fires to the surface, and in the test of sheer 
democracy the Gironde receded, took on the defensive. 
The Mountain grew and turned master. 

Until the i oth of August the forces of either were in 
great part allied. All the quarrels at the Jacobins, all the 
contempt or envy, on the one hand, against the men who 
sat round Madame Roland — against " the drawing-room " 
— on the other all the hatred or disdain of statesmen for 
extremists had been, in the main, inferior to the general 
action of the Revolution. Both factions had exercised their 
principal energies in watching, at last in combating the 
Crown. It was the Gironde, not the Mountain, that had 
launched Paris at the King on the 20th of June; it was 
neither the one nor the other that had forced the Tuileries ; 
each could accuse the other of violence and demagogy, 
each could accuse the other of hesitation. Both were 
united against an enemy that might overwhelm them 
with the first success of Brunswick: the 6000 armed 
in the Tuileries, the monarchy upright, menacing the 
end of all their common creations. The loth of August 
in destroying this common enemy destroyed the bond. 
It was apparent that the Gironde survived, and that the 
full victory of its republican theory was too great for its 
temper to bear. Roland, with his white hair and vener- 
able, quiet voice, reminded one of nothing but the past : 
Vergniaud had the good manners of oratory, he was a 
great gentleman by right of the quality of his genius : 
there could be felt in him the future Defender of the 
King. Brissot was the intrigue of early '92, blundering 
on into a time as little fitted for intrigue as molten 
metal is to chiselling; Guadet was the personal quarrel 



2o8 ROBESPIERRE 

of March carried on int6 September ; Isnard, in a time 
that was listening from day to day for the news of a fresh 
disaster, stood for the forgotten fever in which war had 
been determined. 

Therefore throughout August Robespierre and all the 
Mountain had deliberately mixed with the insurrectionary 
Commune; had taken a species of delight in asserting 
its authority over the dying Legislative Assembly. It 
was the opportunity for revenge, or perhaps, in Robes- 
pierre's own case (and he was the most determined 
opponent of reconciliation), the opportunity for imposing 
a complete democracy upon men who by their view and 
manner, if not by their professions, diverted and corrupted, 
as he thought, the republican spirit. Already the accusa- 
tion of " Federalism," of weakening the country by an 
excessive local autonomy, of not grasping the peril of 
France, had been launched against them; already they 
had begun to chafe against the Commune ^ and to accuse 
the Mountain of arbitrary violence, when the massacres of 
September came, to brand all that division in deep upon 
the soul. Terror, disgust, the sense of the provinces behind 
them, led the Gironde to a definite attack on Paris, to a 
policy of separating Paris out as a criminal, and therefore 
inevitably to a policy of decentralisation : invasion or no 
invasion. Paris answered with the Elections. She chose 
her primaries four days before the massacres. She began 
voting at their close, she voted on for close on a fortnight 
more ^ — and she did not repudiate the slaughter. 

I have said that Robespierre had nothing to do with 
the lynching. It is true of practically all the Mountain. 
Still the twenty-four whom Paris elected were very nearly 
the list of the Ami du Feuple, and Marat himself was 

^ They broke the Commune. Then they repealed their vote ; then 
later, on August 30, they summoned it to the bar of the Assembly, and 
then they gave way for the second time. 

2 Till the 19th. 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 209 

chosen seventh. The great misunderstanding which ended 
in the Terror had been launched with a sufficient cause. 
The pure eyes of the Gironde could become — as they 
remained to the scaffold — indignant eyes condemning 
outrage : the conquering energy of the Mountain could 
seem a sword of justice in the hand of the Republic, 
cutting down treason and rebellion within, parrying and 
guarding on the border. 

From the first meeting of the Convention with closed 
doors and under empty galleries in the empty hall of the 
Tuileries, from the first public session when they trooped 
into the Manege and saw the Legislative melt out and 
lapse into the streets,'^ there appeared in Robespierre the 
one thing then necessary to his success ; he admitted vio- 
lence and fell in with the spirit of his supporters. 

He was conspicuously lacking in all that we know in 
history to belong to leaders. He abhorred their peculiar 
vices ; he had not so much as heard of their principal 
qualities. The communion that your leader has with 
men, his corporate character, was a thing utterly unknown 
to Robespierre, it could have found no place in his 
exclusive and positive logic. The leader's vague but 
irresistible mandate seemed to him non-existent, a fiction 
of parasites ; the leader's necessary seizure of power, when, 
in special dangers, the organised mass demands anima- 
tion and unison, seemed to him a common usurpation. 
Throughout the Revolution the men who had something 
in them of that magic of the leader he suspected, tracked, 
and, if" he could, destroyed. He saw it and hated it in 
Dumouriez, he tasted it and opposed it in Vergniaud. 
Perhaps later the jar of it in Danton led him to the betrayal 
of that friend. The men that sum up other men and 
evoke loyalty must sin in two ways, by the concupiscence 

^ The outgoing and incoming Parliaments were curiously careful to 
maintain a continuity of authority. With the King a prisoner and the 
permanent officials in disorder, it was a necessity, 

O 



2IO ROBESPIERRE 

of power and by tlie fondness for boon companions ; they 
come to find in either vice a necessary food. They 
exist by an insatiate superiority, and they enlarge and 
temper this insolence by a genial lenience for, and com- 
monly a participation in, the feast of the senses. Both 
these sins were odious to Robespierre. He was designed 
uniquely to register and to express: he could never 
inspire. Yet he became a kind of leader — he led more 
than armies ; at last he all but imposed a religion. 

This paradox is the theme of every page in which 
his name appears. It proceeded, as I have said con- 
tinually throughout this book, from the sharp and deep 
impression which one face of his metallic spirit had 
struck into the popular mind. The people took his 
name, put it up for a Ldbarum, and under the veil of 
the name they raised the man himself; but something 
more was needed to produce the short accident of his 
final pre-eminence. He had to avoid the checks that 
would have diverted so gradual and insistent a pro- 
gression as was his towards power. How was it that 
in '89 he avoided the officialism to which he was tempted 
and which would have buried him ? In '90 that he 
kept the sympathy of the priests ? In '9 1 that he 
restrained the Jacobins ? In early '92 that he could 
oppose the war ? There was in all that precaution an 
element of political intrigue and, at last, of ambition, 
but much the most of it was the chance of his character. 
His temper made the statesmen his enemies ; their 
enmity forced him into the channel that led straight to 
'94 ; the pressure of that enmity forbade the least diver- 
gence. 

So now a circumstance, fortunate for the moment, 
preserved the dominion of Robespierre by permitting 
him to abandon his reserve, his bitter generalities and 
his innuendoes of the earlier part of the year. Paris 
demanded champions ; the Gironde, which was the 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 211 

majority of the Convention, the executive power, the 
provinces — almost the Republic — charged against the 
deputation of Paris ; the twenty-four. Robespierre 
undertook the defence, and that with an extraordinary 
unity of action; he let everything leave his mind save 
the interest of a ceaseless direct attack upon the coterie 
of the Rolands and the weaving into that attack of his 
ancient formulae. 

In this he had no rival. He was alone with the 
people. Marat, without weight or balance, giving plea- 
sure only to fools and even by fools never followed : 
Marat, who had not hesitated to conceive the massacres of 
September, was not a target. He had to be killed before 
he could be deified. The Gironde made him a butt or 
held him up as an excuse for their violence, but even 
were he overthrown (as five months later they would 
have overthrown him by trial) ; even were he murdered 
(as ten months later he was murdered), Marat's fall was 
not the fall of the Mountain. Danton was occupied in 
the larger things. He was reaping the fruits of Valmy, 
attempting to preserve the neutrality of England ; his 
mind was full of the armies, he was weary of the crisis 
that paralysed the Convention; he would have recon- 
ciled. 

Robespierre alone was plunged and absorbed in that 
political struggle. He accepted the burden of Paris and 
took upon his misshapen shield with unalterable fixity of 
purpose all the spears of the Gironde, while outside his 
mind, unheeded, rushed the autumn of '92. 

Here, as in every written attempt to explain the 
man, one must omit the background. Yet it is perhaps 
the greatest picture in history; the first rising of the 
nation, the armies driven to the frontier before the south- 
westerly gales of that autumn, the charges under the torn 
sky of Jemappes. 

These things passed beside him in his self-absorption, 



212 ROBESPIERRE 

and even in that great time it is only in debate and 
writing and through the mind that you find him re- 
vealed. 

Valmy passed ; the invasion was thrust back home ; 
the cheers and singing of Jemappes ran through Paris ; 
Dumouriez, turned to an idol, was planning what miracles 
of exterior politics might be worked with his victorious 
and ragged army — running to Paris to intrigue, driving 
back to the frontier to intrigue. Europe, both central and 
remote, was being sucked into the whirlpool of what was to 
be a universal war. But Robespierre, all the mornings, sat 
in the little room above the carpenter's shed writing of 
himself and democracy; all the afternoons pursued the 
tireless theme at the Manage ; all the evenings reiterated it 
at the Jacobins : preaching self and equality and giving 
the Gironde the blows that Paris delighted to see given. 

New expressions came to his pen. Names, insults, 
and direct venom ; a habit extraneous to his character. 
It was one of those moments of extreme vigour that 
diversified his progress, a recollection of the last week 
of Arras, of the nights of July '91 in the club. And 
to the natural heat of such a moment a long memory of 
accusation and domestic humiliation added the personal 
note : awoke vanity a little and stirred him. 

For, as I have said, it was his enemies that put this 
new pov/er into him. 

Consider the nature of his experience and the nature 
of his suffering beneath it, during this past year of 
1792. Commonly silent when the radicals had met in 
the spring at the Hotel Brittanique and made a court for 
Madame Roland ; knowing that in his frequent absence, 
after his early departures, he was mentioned only for 
his awkwardness in such good company ; less virile than 
these Buzots and young Barbaroux, ungenial, pretentious, 
he had in their presence something of what the poor 
feel in the houses of the rich — shame, self-defence, and 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 213 

secret angers. Consider also with what profound sincerity 
he suspected all that world. If he, a virtuous man, was 
so ridiculous, where was their virtue ? He noticed their 
elegance, their memories of society; he saw them 
plotting combinations and policies together. He saw 
that hiding of self which is peculiar to good breeding. 
Absolute sincerity tempered in a sharp creed is like a steel 
instrument of surgery. With this he probed the falsity 
of Dumouriez ; he laid bare the inner nerve of meddle- 
someness that inspired Brissot's activity, and he remained 
silent. They knew that he knew them. 

These men had become the ministry. The Rolands 
had been installed in their magnificent Hotel of the Home 
Office in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champ. There had 
been modest banquets, stoical splendours, many servants 
and lights round the table of the Gironde. They had been 
power, when he had behind him only a Paris without votes, 
the leadership of the Jacobins and the adoration of simple 
men. Then came the war, the war that the Girondins made, 
and that he had consistently opposed. It had gone ill. The 
populace had risen under the menace of Brunswick and 
overthrown the Court, and, in the rush, destroyed also 
the platform on which the gentlefolk and the decent 
philosophers had built up an Utopia. The populace had 
lifted up suddenly to a great eminence all that he 
represented and led : he could not forbear from revenge, 
and the men who belonged to the Rolands could not 
forbear from attacking him, from destroying him if 
possible, lest his immense popularity should make him a 
master, and they and their Republic should be drowned 
in the flood of Paris. 

Brissot, in the Patriote Frangais} at the very opening 
of the Republic, on the 22nd of September, raised 
an alarm against him, spoke of the " Demagogues " : 
Buzot, two days later, in the open Parliament asked " If 

1 139, 1140. 



214 ROBESPIERRE 

they were tlie slaves of the members for Paris," urged 
and carried a committee to watch and menace Paris, 
demanded a guard from the departments; and said 
all this, turning to the benches of the Mountain, and 
thrusting out a gesture against Robespierre. La Source 
asked, " What was Paris more than any other depart- 
ment?" Rebecqui, on the same day, the 25 th (it was the 
stormiest of the early debates), said in so many words, 
" We know the truth at Marseilles : a party aims at 
the dictatorship and Robespierre is its head." 

Robespierre accepted the challenge. Hitherto, since 
the loth of August, he had but agreed with the 
Commune and shown himself a frank partisan of the 
city which he represented. Now he consented to become 
a weapon and to strike at the heart of the provincial 
clique in which Paris discovered inefficiency, lukewarm- 
ness, disintegrating federalism, the loss of the State. 
His action was the easier because his enemies fell into 
the error common to passion — they expressed tendencies 
and general dangers as facts and particular perils. 
Robespierre was as yet but an enormous reputation : they 
tried to prove against him, as in a court of law, the 
absurd charge of tyranny and attempted dictatorship. 
He was senior member of the group that included Marat : 
they attempted to fasten on him the horror of September. 
To rebut such charges was an easy triumph. He heard 
Rebecqui out, noted him like a lawyer, took the tribune, 
and, as an athlete a weight, sustained irony for two hours. 

"It was good for the Republic and worthy of Marseilles 
that any danger of preponderance should be watched and 
extinguished as it rose. Rebecqui had thought to dis- 
cover that danger, and had named its author. The 
principal safeguard of the Republic was this heroic 
jealousy and suspicion." 

He spoke prodigiously of himself and all he had 
done for the Revolution. He was careful in his 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 215 

articulation and touched every enemy with the point 
of a rapier : to Petion in the chair he recalled 
their friendship, but he smiled unpleasantly as he 
recalled it. Every interruption of the majority he 
bore out with patience. He took up the thread of 
his speech when the protest was spent, laboured and 
succeeded in making the masters of the Convention 
ridiculous. He advertised his person to the hundreds of 
new obscure deputies that had come up from the provinces 
under the terror of September ; that had been taught to 
fear Paris — and Robespierre as the master of Paris. 
These men came round a little later ; their influence 
began to support the Mountain ; they began to weaken 
the Gironde.^ 

This 25 th of September was then, in spite of the 
fluctuating majority, an open victory for Robespierre. 
Young Barbaroux, " Barbaroux of Marseilles " (who 
spoke of himself in the third person, a noble trick), 
supported Rebecqui : quoted a chance phrase of Panis 
that Robespierre would make a good dictator. It fell flat. 
Vergniaud himself could not save the Gironde from the 
effect of the debate. Robespierre went forward. He 
enlarged over the Jacobins; he caused them that day 
to begin their proscriptions by the exclusion of Brissot. 
He felt himself in the saddle ; called up his brother and 
sister from Arras; established his whole household and 
the small accumulation of its fortune in the house of 
the Rue St. Honor^. He began to issue his lengthy 
journal, " Letters to my Constituents," by which he could 
get into touch with the support of the whole city as in the 
Convention he touched the galleries with his voice, and 
received from them, as it were, the ratification of Paris. 

^ It is characteristic of Robespierre that the best notes on which to 
reproduce this scene and speech are contained in Robespierre's own 
account in the first number of his " Letter to my Constituents." There 
are also, however, the Moniteur and the Ddbats of the day. 



2i6 ROBESPIERRE 

It is impossible to omit a reference to these papers. 
His indefatigable pen, his close bent attitude of the 
spectacled writer, his endless phrasing stood out from 
all the words of them. " It is not enough to overthrow a 
throne : our business is to raise upon its ruins a holy 
equality and the imprescriptible rights of man. One 
empty word does not create a republic ; it is made rather 
by the character of its citizens. The soul of the Republic 
is virtue, that is, the love of one's country and a large- 
hearted devotion that merges private into public interests," 
and so forth, for nearly thirty pages. Save when he is 
describing his own speech, he is reiterating all the 
commonplaces of the liberals, the exact phrases of 
early '92, of '91, of '90. The interest of it lies not 
so much in the evidence it affords of his one incessant 
note, as in the quality of the public attention that never 
wearied of it. It is only in times of high fervour 
approaching delirium that humanity can tolerate such 
repetitions. So in "revivals" men and women sway 
ecstatic to phrases they have heard a thousand times. 

All October he maintained the steady fire of his 
pamphlets, the pressure of the club upon the Parliament; 
Dumouriez returning victorious, he consented to embrace 
him in a famous scene ; he took care to avoid the 
trail of Marat, he concentrated upon the Gironde. He 
spoke little at the Convention, but after standing over 
the deputies for a month as the menace of Paris, he 
provoked a second scene on the 29th of October. 
Again he listened with patience to the Gironde and 
he replied again at great length and with insistent and 
controlled acidity to the long diatribe of Louvet : he 
had the triumph of hearing himself definitely accused 
of attempting power. He put off for a week the 
solemn defence in whose ritual he delighted, and when 
the day came, on the 5 th of November, he issued from 
the ordeal to the applause of Paris in the galleries. By a 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 217 

vote nearly unanimous the Parliament left him innocent ; 
in the evening, as his custom was, he went to the Jacobins 
to hammer in the blow. The occasion was too great for 
him to tell his own triumph. Merlin of Thionville and 
Manuel gave the epic of the day under the smile of Jean- 
Bon St. Andr6 in the chair : all the radicals. And who 
was the last to bring his homage ? Garnier of the Aube, 
the unknown man who was in Thermidor to drag down 
Robespierre with a Phrase. 

I have no space to give in full the rear-guard action 
that the Gironde fought after this defeat. November is 
full of it. Louvet, to whom the Parliament had refused 
the right of reply — so utterly had his attack failed — 
published a ridiculous pamphlet called " Robespierre and 
his Royalists": Roland sent it out broadcast at the public 
expense.^ The newspapers of the Gironde, wealthy and 
official, continued more moderately than before but with 
equal insistence to strike at the pedestal that support ed 
Robespierre; but though the Gironde was the Govern- 
ment and (a fact not without importance) the last tradi- 
tion of culture, the great party could neither weaken the 
man nor the city that opposed it. Paris filtered, as it 
were, into the Convention ; its central information the 
colour of passion it leant to that knowledge ; the more 
exact memories it possessed of the King's treason, of 
the nature of the old and discredited compromise, affected 
these provincials. Deputies lodging scattered up and 
down Paris suspected the capital less and absorbed more 
of its temper. Day by day and debate by debate small 
groups and individuals broke off from the majority upon 
which the power of the Girondins depended. 

Here is an anecdote that shows the kind of resistance 
the party met with in its new methods of self-defence 

^ Among other places, to Arras. The town council, proud that one 
fellow-citizen of theirs should b» so famous, replied to Koland in a very 
angry letter. 



2i8 ROBESPIERRE 

and the kind of thing that ultimately ruined it. Gorsas 
was editing his " Courrier of the 8 3 departments " on 
the lines that his clique demanded, regularly attacking 
the senior member for Paris. He suffered from an illu- 
sion common to editors and believed as he wrote that he 
was but a mouthpiece of the people, yet he believed 
he could say what he chose and that it would still be 
the people that were saying it. A shock roused him 
from such complacency. 

His paper received a letter (printed on the 14th of 
November) asking why Robespierre was attacked suddenly 
after a particular date. The writer was a subscriber from 
the foundation of the paper : he had read Gorsas all these 
three years writing the regular praises of the typical 
revolutionary, and he did not understand the change. 
Gorsas could not answer the truth ; perhaps he hardly 
recognised it himself. He could not say, " You see, we 
of the Gironde are poets, with a fine vision of our generous 
and equal republic ; we are gentlemen, we hate violence 
and we are good orators and statesmen : we are menaced 
by the position of the Convention in this turbulent 
capital, and the vast popularity of Robespierre in that 
capital frightens us. We must break it if we can. 
Moreover, we find his character exasperating; he is a 
d6vot to a creed, and he has joined and will lead the 
party of massacre." Gorsas could not, I say, plead in 
this fashion, so he simply answered (in his issue of the 
20th) that, " He with his own ears had heard Robespierre 
talking of God to a crowd." Imagine the effect of such 
a reply upon the worthy citizen to whom it might be 
addressed ! One thing the Girondins failed in, and it 
was their ruin. They could never touch and feel the 
people.^ 

^ For instance, Madame Roland, the daughter of a small shopkeeper 
and artisan, complains on the supreme night of her arrest of the smell of 
the crowd. 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 219 

Of fifty such pieces of journalism I clioose one other, 
because it expresses with admirable exactitude the com- 
plaint against Robespierre. It is not just ; it neglects 
the sincerity that dominated and still absorbed Robes- 
pierre's temptations of vanity or ambition; it proceeds 
from the pen of a man in the Lucretian tradition of 
Diderot, grandly indignant with religions, and irritated 
that the name of God should still linger so tenaciously. 
But the man was very great, and he has driven his chisel 
in deep. It is Condorcet's. 

"... And there are some who ask why there are 
always so many women hanging round Robespierre : at 
his house, in the galleries of the Jacobins and of the 
Convention. It is because this Revolution of ours is a 
religion, and Robespierre is leading a sect therein. He is 
a priest at the head of his worshippers. . . . Robespierre 
preaches ; Robespierre censures ; he is furious, grave, 
melancholy, exalted — all coldly ; his thoughts flow regu- 
larly, his habits are regular ; he thunders against the rich 
and the great ; he lives on next to nothing ; he has no 
necessities. He has but one mission — to speak, and he 
speaks unceasingly ; he creates disciples ... he has 
every character, not of the maker of a religion, but of the 
originator of an opinion ; he has an ascetic reputation 
about him ... he talks of God and of Providence ; he 
calls himself the friend of the humble and the weak ; he 
gets himself followed by women and by the poor in spirit ; 
he gravely receives their adoration. . . . He is a priest, 
and will never be other than a priest. . . ."^ 

That is how Condorcet saw, despised, and was op- 
pressed under the rising fame of a man who was destined 
to catch France, as he had caught Paris, under the singular 

^ Hamel quotes all this at great length (ii. 522), and, what is very 
remarkable, he here admits one of the few sober criticisms made upon hia 
hero. The original essay may be read in full in the Chronique de Paris 
for the 9th November 1792. 



220 ROBESPIERRE 

attraction of his grave self- exposition and the ceaseless 
similar activity of his mind. But Robespierre added 
much that autumn to the little Condorcet saw in him. 
He that had taken a brief for Paris, followed up like a 
duty all the Parisian attacks on the early hesitation of 
the Convention, and consented to lose a great part of his 
united theory. He began to demand (for the sake of the 
Revolution) policies inconsistent with his Rousseau, he left 
his deductions somewhat. This abandonment of a part 
of himself, this transformation in him, which grew to be 
so conspicuous in the winter of '93, is first clearly settled 
for history in December '92. 

Let me describe with special insistence the outset of 
this new career, in which passions distinct from his 
unpassionate soul lit Robespierre, as it were, from with- 
out. The phase of transition began with the King's trial; 
by the time Louis had suffered, Robespierre had been 
struck irretrievably by the storm, and drove before it. 
The King and Robespierre are the opposing poles of that 
autumn. 

I can see, between the victim of the Convention and 
the man who was leading a resolute minority in, and was 
soon to be the master of, the Convention, a sharp and 
dramatic contrast : a contrast not only of circumstance 
(that is evident), but also of mood. 

The beginning of the King's agony coincided with the 
beginning of Robespierre's great advance and satisfaction, 
and of the two gates the one man passed through the ivory, 
the other through the horn: one was compelled or permitted 
by his fate to touch the first truths ; the other was snared 
into the illusion that ended in his ruin. 

I will not pretend that real things are sad to men ; 
God made real things, and all that God has made is 
good. But when a man or a class has lived remote and 
shielded in an unreal world, the first plunge into reality 
is a shock like the transition of death. Gentlemen 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 221 

know it when they fall to the common condition of 
the world. 

Far Louis, then, all in those December and January 
days became the trouble of being an ordinary man in 
adversity, the sadness of reality, the reality of winter 
daylight, of long nights without sleep, of rain, and almost 
of despair. But for religion it would have been despair. 
Louis, accused, tried, condemned, fell back upon the one 
character in him that gave stuff to his unfortunate small- 
ness — he became simple, and in his calamity his simplicity 
grew conspicuous. When, on the i ith of December, he 
had first appeared before the Convention, it was after a 
morning in which he had breakfasted with his wife and 
children, in which he had played a quiet game with his 
little son, in which he had insisted upon petty but pathetic 
details in the matter of his clothing, in the matter of his 
right to privacy. He had gone out into the drizzle pain- 
fully, unshaven, stooping, and pale, still gross in body, 
his brown coat his principal care, and had said little as 
they drove to the Parliament. 

Seated before the Convention he had refused to 
admit his signatures to a hundred documents where his 
hand was only too plainly apparent; it was puerile, but 
so human that the chord of pity was again touched. 
Once even he did admit his hand, at the foot of some 
pension or bribery or other, saying that "that was in- 
deed his signature, for it was an act of charity." It was 
imbecile, but no one could fail to see the plain man 
instructed by lawyers. 

When he returned under the rain from the Parlia- 
ment, Chaumette, the most bitter journalist of the republi- 
cans, the secretary of the new Commune, sat beside him 
in the carriage, and the King was still more an ordinary, 
unfortunate man. 

They spoke a few words upon the bread they were 
eating — unhappy communion. The King, fatigued, left 



222 ROBESPIERRE 

part of tlie loaf aside. Chaumette had a scruple in 
throwing it out of the window : " his grandmother had 
told him as a child that the waste of bread was a great 
sin." Louis, torpid and automatic, his bulging eyes 
lapsing into stupor, made some kind of reply; said this 
grandmother was evidently a woman of sense. The King 
noted mechanically the streets through which the car- 
riage passed; made stupid and simple remarks upon 
their history and appearance. Chaumette replied to 
him as one traveller vulgarly met with another of equal 
insignificance might reply to the commonplaces of a 
stage-coach. All these silly little human details the 
people heard, and Louis became for them what he had 
never yet become — an ordinary man, a fool like any one 
of us. 

For a fortnight the prosecution was abandoned, 
while above it raged the increasing quarrel of the 
Mountain and the Gironde. When later Louis was 
again before his judges the hesitation that must always 
take men upon the eve of those legal decisions which 
involve the life of a man sharpened this advocate of his 
— the pity of the general people. The majority was 
so small, in the case of some of them self-contradiction 
was so evident, that the deputies of the Convention 
seemed themselves to be the accused. 

His passion, his last will, his tearing from his family, 
these throughout France, and, alas, throughout Europe, be- 
came the subject of I know not how many prints, pamph- 
lets, ballads. I have before my eyes as I write the best 
known of the pictures that swelled the English propa- 
ganda: in this, with the most ridiculous nobility of 
feature, he is seen breaking away in the awful morning 
of his execution from his wife (to whom is lent a very 
inconsistent dignity), and from his children, who are 
evidently made in that picture the children of all of us. 

When a man commits a great crime those who 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 223 

(driven by the necessities of a common religion or of 
politics) undertake his defence, can never resist the 
temptation to a gross unreasonableness. They will pre- 
sent his sufferings to you continually : they will take for 
granted with a smile or with a violent ellipsis of indigna- 
tion, that no proofs of his guilt exist. They postulate 
innocence, refuse to plead, and harp day after day upon 
his punishment. So it was with Louis, but a man 
would be over-bitter who in these days of ours, now that 
the quarrel against monarchy has been so thoroughly 
settled, should grudge him the unreasoning consolation 
of loyalty that he received. 

To deny that he had been guilty of treason is simply 
to deny the right of a nation to safeguard its own 
defence, and to deny that the executive is the servant 
of the national interest. But there was in the cere- 
monial of the old monarchy which has now departed 
from Europe something which could easily disturb an 
intellect so infirm ; nor will any one who values justice 
deny that the man who brought such incalculable mis- 
fortunes upon his country had acted on his lights of 
honour, had avoided a breach between his own soul and 
the judgment of God. The caricaturists did well when 
they represented him in every ignominious detail, yet 
passing into Paradise. 

The day came for his death, and again under clouds 
that had covered the sky throughout that month, pur- 
sued by the damp, unwholesome chill that for a month 
had been the atmosphere of his tragedy, he went out of 
life under all the circumstances which can most throw 
man back upon himself: there is something naked and 
therefore sublime in his departure. 

Against this set what had happened to the man who 
as a boy eighteen years before had read that speech to 
his young King in the premier college of the university. 
Illusion surrounded Robespierre throughout that trial; 



224 ROBESPIERRE 

the illusion that he was in some way a victim, the illu- 
sion that the Commune was the nation, and could rightly 
press upon the Parliament, the illusion that the people 
whose hold over the executive was still a dogma at the 
back of his mind, was in this special case forbidden from 
judging (for he knew by how vast a majority the nation 
was opposed to the death of the King), the illusion that his 
consistent opposition to the penalty of death could in the 
case of a character like his own find an exception for a 
despot — that inconsistency was to lead him to watch the 
Terror unmoved, and perhaps to use it as a weapon. 
Above all he suffered the illusion that a man can bargain 
with his own faith and yet remain all himself. 

When, in the last days of November, Cambon had 
proposed the suppression of the salaries of the Church — 
on the same occasion that Danton, just off for the armies, 
made his short and famous defence of popular religion — 
Robespierre insisted that the way out of their difficulties, 
financial and all, was the immediate arraignment of the 
King.^ 

Five days later, on the 3rd of December, he de- 
livered in the Convention his principal speech upon the 
culpability of Louis. 

Already he had passed down so many steps in his 
lapse from the character of his part. He had already 
found his ambitions. He had defended the Commune 
against the Legislative in August like a partizan; he 
had turned quite suddenly to a ritual use of the word 
" Republic " ; he, the opponent of the war, had illogically 
flattered the lyrical enthusiasm that prepared Valmy — • 
an enthusiasm he did not comprehend, and which yet he 
consented to serve. So now in an even and unaccented 
speech there appeared incongruously his determination to 

* The speech also contains a further example of his regular support of 
the priests. I omit it because it would only interrupt the purely political 
action with which I am here concerned. 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 225 

be the Lector of tlie new republican world, in wliicb he 
so bitterly envied the Girondins their place of rheto- 
ricians, and of which he was jealously to watch for a 
short time Danton, as the powerful executive. Thus he 
speaks of the necessity " of disregarding the kings, and of 
considering only the establishment of liberty and of a 
republic." For the first time in his life he permitted 
to pass his lips the demand for the death of a 
man. 

It is by no accident that for three years of increasing 
violence he almost alone of the revolutionaries had never 
threatened death even in the vaguest terms; had not 
spoken of the sword of the law, nor cried with Isnard 
that the axe of the Revolution awaited traitors. It was 
consistent with his whole mind, with the whole develop- 
ment of his youth, to find such things repugnant ; it was 
consistent also with that hesitation he always had in 
leaving principles to speak of men. His demand for 
death, therefore, though upon this first occasion it was 
exceptional, though it was with regard to what he sin- 
cerely did believe to be the greatest of political crimes, 
and an occasion never to be repeated, yet certainly had 
something in it of deflection from the very narrow path 
and strait which he had followed since first he read his 
Rousseau alone in the fields by the Scarpe; and into 
that deflection the ambitions of his new leadership 
undoubtedly entered as a cause. 

A day or two later he descended to permitting at 
the Jacobins the destruction of the bust of Mirabeau; 
Duplay proposed it — (he can hardly have done so of his 
own initiative) ; Robespierre in a kind of false enthusiasm 
supported a proposition of which he was not improbably 
the author. But even here when he was doing what a 
crowd willed, his lack of proportion and his abstraction 
appeared, for in denouncing Mirabeau he must also 
denounce Helvetius, whose bust stood somewhere in the 

P 



226 ROBESPIERRE 

hall, and wliom lie remembered Rousseau to liave 
hated/ 

The Gironde noted and laughed. They dragged 
back into the light the forgotten day when Robespierre 
had proposed the Pantheon for Mirabeau's funeral, and 
Robespierre, in the meshes of his new self-contradiction, 
was at the pains to publish a laborious and hardly 
successful apology. 

The attitude upon which I am now insisting con- 
tinued throughout the trial of the King. He seemed on 
one occasion to argue like any Herbert in favour of an 
immediate and arbitrary execution, and became for a 
moment the target of a violent and physical opposition 
in the Parliament. The hold that he was getting upon 
that mob of Paris for which the Girondins had conceived 
a terror and an abomination, pointed him out already as 
a possible master, and when Guadet, accusing him of a 
kind of despotism, forced Robespierre to a protest, that 
protest was met by repeated threats of arrest from all 
sides of the hall, but the extreme Left : a curious re- 
hearsal of a scene that was in eighteen months to destroy 
him. He was driven from the tribune, came up into it 
again, received some support from the Mountain to which 
such scenes were lending cohesion and discipline, re- 
affirmed his demand for the King's immediate trial, and 
ended his unsuccessful speech in a silence, which perhaps 
his own calm had in a fashion imposed upon his 
opponents. 

When Louis appeared at the bar Robespierre defended 
the action of the Commune in the rigour of the imprison- 
ment it had imposed upon the King. On the 23rd of 
December, three days before the date of the King's second 
appearance and final trial, Robespierre again spoke, this 
time at the Jacobins, saying that those who might upon 

1 He spared Priestley, of whom he knew, I presume, neither good nor 
ill, and whose bust, crowned with faded laurels, stood third. 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 227 

that occasion appear to promote delay should be treated 
as suspects, that those even should be treated as suspects 
who did not actively vote for immediate condemnation. 
He was even at the pains of ridiculing the defence made 
by Desfeze, and on the 27th, in a speech of excessive 
length, he hammered round his main point, that had the 
King been an ordinary criminal with such proof of 
treason against him, any court would have settled the 
matter in twenty-four hours. He treated with an angry 
contempt the proposition that the judgment of Louis 
should be referred to a popular vote, and his bitterness 
was greater because he knew that he was plunging deeper 
and deeper into contradictions of himself. There was a 
note of threatening never heard before from his lips, and 
only to reappear long after when he had become some- 
thing of a master. " Citizens, it is to be decided whether 
you are rebels or the benefactors of humanity." When 
it was cast up against him that this demand for an 
immediate and summary vengeance was that of but a 
small minority in the nation, he threw away all his past 
for an hour and defended such minorities; spoke like 
any don of " the virtue which is always to be discovered 
in minorities." 

The road he had taken drove him into mere sophistry ; 
of all methods the most naturally odious to a consistent 
man. 

That attitude of Paris and of Robespierre was 
answered in the most famous of Vergniaud's speeches. 
It has been turned into a defence of the King. It was 
not that. It was the hesitation of a man who can see 
many things at once, and who fears immediate decisions. 
He knew Europe. He saw the approach of madness 
over the nation, the great ring of wars. He heard the 
cries in the street against the King, the pressure of 
the crowd, and with the presentiment that haunted all 
the Gironde he felt the shadow of death sweep over the 



228 ROBESPIERRE 

hall as the mob rolled past outside. He had haunting 
him as he spoke that terrible illiterate Commune of 
'93, the great menace to all the older time — and the 
Girondins for all their democracy were the spirit and 
culture of the older time. That Commune was sitting 
and watching a mile away. At Vergniaud and all of 
his, all the balancing Gironde, the scornful suspicions 
of the Left were thrown in one phrase, " Remember the 
sense of justice that is still somewhere in you, like a 
lamp left in a tomb." ^ To the Left these great men 
seemed cowards because they halted a little before 
Europe arming and the plunge into '93. 

It was the afternoon of the i 5 th of January. The 
meagre light of winter had already faded, the three great 
groups of candles hung lit over the immense hall. The 
last of the discussion limped on past the dinner-hour, 
and after they had dined, the women of the Palais Royal, 
the coterie of figalite, trooped in to tarnish what was 
most convinced and ascetic in the Republic with their 
venal and corrupt applause. The rich of the faction of 
Orleans sat there together determined on death. For 
one of them, Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, death waited 
also. He was stabbed for his vote in a caf^ of the Palais 
Royal, and on his mask that was modelled after death 
there still lies the smile of his birth and riches. 

A roll-call of names began and a vote from each was 
demanded. 

Robespierre came among the first by the accident of 
bis election, the senior member for Paris. He had not 
so far caught, nor did he ever so far catch, the vigour of 
the great renewal as to achieve terseness; so when 
Vergniaud, presiding, called out " Robespierre," and when 
there was demanded of him (as of every member present 
in turn) an exact expression of his reasons for his vote, 
he lapsed into the literary verbosity which had suited 

1 The phrase is St. Just's. 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 229 

tlie discussions of the year before, but ■vvhicli were so 
grotesquely out of place upon this terrible occasion when 
they could only recall his older and more consistent self. 
Of what kind must that man have been to have persisted 
even under the spell of tragedy in such long phrases as 
these ? The importance of the occasion compels me to 
transcribe them. They are commonly neglected and 
very well worthy of remembrance. There is no space to 
give them in full. 

" I have no taste for long speeches upon selt-evident 
matters. They are of a sinister augury for the fortunes 
of liberty. I have ever made it a special point to leave 
aside the distinctions of logomachy, which only appear 
when there is a desire to evade the logical consequences 
of some recognised principle. I have never learned the 
art of dividing my political existence in such fashion as 
to find in myself two separate functions, that of the 
judge and that of the statesman. I am incapable of so 
outraging reason and justice as to regard the life of a 
despot as being of greater weight than that of common 
citizens, and of putting my intellect to the rack in order 
to save the greatest of criminals from a fate which the 
law pronounces against crimes far less grave, and which 
the law has already inflicted upon his accomplices. I 
will remain inflexible against oppressors, because I re- 
main compassionate for the oppressed. I know nothing 
of that humanity which is for ever sacrifi.cing whole 
peoples and protecting tyrants. The sentiment which 
drove me to beg from the Constituent Assembly the 
abolition of capital punishment, is the very same which 
to-day drives me to ask for its special application to the 
arbitrary ruler of my country, and to monarchy itself in 
his person. I have no occasion to prophesy or to conjure 
up future and unknown despots, and I will use no such 
vision to excuse me from striking this man whom I have 



230 ROBESPIERRE 

declared convicted as lias, uniformly, this Assembly. I 
vote for death." ^ 

This is, not in full but in its gist, the long declaration 
with which Robespierre confirmed his adhesion to the 
new political force, to the Commune which now wrapped 
him up, and in whose fortress he stood. It would not be 
just to him to read into it mere pedantry, as one can read 
mere pedantry into so many of his discourses; still less 
would it be just to cast ridicule in such a moment upon 
the too violent personal note which leads in every 
sentence, almost, with the word " I." It was not written ; 
it was spoken. Rhetoric and the sting of a hundred 
insults ; his violent and embittered quarrel with political 
opponents whom he certainly believed to be moderates, 
compromisers, and the enemies of liberty, gave him suffi- 
cient passion to make this outburst (in the ears of the 
Assembly) a piece of pure rhetoric ; and it is specially to be 
noted that the very same quality which lent him his 
tenacity to principle gave him, when once he had departed 
from his own path, an obstinacy to continue in that false 
direction. He sat down flushed and angry, having thrown 
down a gauntlet at the Gironde. So one after another 
the Mountain voted — for the deputies of Paris came in a 
group — Danton especially rang over the hall in three 
lines : " I am not a politician ; I vote for death." 

The long night went on like an interminable litany. 
Men passed in and out of the hall to sleep, to eat, and to 
return. The dawn broke uneasily, a winter transition into 
a winter daylight. The short day passed and still one 
after another the coloured coats moved up from their 
benches to the tribune, turned round, and addressed their 
audience : cried in a loud voice : " Death absolute," " Death, 
but respite," " Banishment," " Imprisonment," each in his 
kind. One after another they signed the minute of their 
declaration, and went down the steps again to give way 

* The whole may be found in the Moniteur of January 21, 1793. 



ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS 231 

to the next. The second evening came and they were 
still voting. Three hours passed in which the votes were 
unsealed, inscribed, and counted with the most exact 
care, then within an hour of midnight, before men 
exhausted and almost entered into a world of sleep, 
haunted with the terrors and the presentiments of sleep, 
Vergniaud, his own eyes drooping with the same fatigue, 
read out in his grave and peaceful voice : " It is with a 
profound sadness that I declare the majority of the 
Assembly to be for death." 

Very few days remained. The appeal of Louis' counsel 
was rejected. Poor old Malesherbes ^ — short, vulgar, a 
hero — pleaded vainly ; touching all, but achieving nothing. 
The appeal to the people, the last hope of the Gironde, 
was rejected. In the war and the public danger 
it appeared too much like an abdication of power, A 
letter from the King of Spain promising I know not 
what support, or threatening I know not what punish- 
ment, was rejected. 

On the 2 1 st Robespierre sat after the morning meal 
in the household of the Duplays. The youngest of the 
daughters asked him what was toward that the streets 
should be so full of people. He answered that there 
was that doing which she would do ill to see, and bade 
some servant go and shut the great outer door of the 
archway that gave upon the street.^ Louis XVI. went 
by past the house with his gaolers and his priest in the 
lane of a vast and silent crowd. Before the midday 
meal the procession returned along that same Rue St. 
i^ Honor^ from the great square beyond. The line of the 

^ Every one should read of the death of this man of the old regime. A 
year later he waited calmly in his garden for his arrest, and on approach- 
ing the scaffold betrayed all the emotions of relief from the tedium of 
living. 

'^ This story was told by Lebas, who had it from his aunt. 



232 ROBESPIERRE 

Capetians was broken and the last of tlie true kings was 
sunk in the quicklime of the Madeleine. 

In that cold and ill-lit hour was let loose the fury of 
the governments of Europe, closed the Neutrality of 
England, and sacrificed the sympathy of America. When 
the door was unlocked and Robespierre reappeared 
among men it was to face problems and a turmoil which 
he had in part let loose, he that had so consistently 
opposed the armed crusade. Then a fortnight and 
France was at war with the whole world.^ 

^ An exaggeration. 



CHAPTER VII 
THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 

The Girondins were struck and were falling. They 
never had been France, but only a superb opposition, 
opposing tyranny from the vague sky of the ideal. On 
the death of the King, who had stood for the positive 
tradition of the nation, they came to a last rally; with 
the spring season they fell. Their fall and their sacrifice 
are the other names for the establishment and growth 
of the Terror. France reseized herself with violence : 
out of her instinct for united government and for a head 
at Paris came the despotism of Paris over the depart- 
ments, of the brain over the body. 

I have insisted at such length in my last chapter 
upon the sharp five months of the struggle that lay 
between the imprisonment and the execution of the 
King, because that space had transformed Robespierre. 
He had entered it the idol rather than the chief of a 
political minority ; he had been the cantator of the 
sacred texts, preaching, thinking himself a man op- 
pressed by the regular forces of government and batter- 
ing from below, in a hopeless opposition, what were then 
the sure foundations of the Gironde. The war, which he 
detested, had come. , The palace which was the common 
enemy he saw half- allied with the drawing-room of 
Roland, with what he thought to be nothing but an in- 
triguing clique ; — Dumouriez and Brissot were in his eyes 
the leaders of this shameful cabal. He was perhaps the 
first at the Jacobins, but the club was still a battlefield. 
He had feared the 20th of June. In August he had 



234 ROBESPIERRE 

sliut himself in at home, disappointed and disdainful on 
the eve of the assault on the Palace.-^ 

In a day and a night, not by his work — by work 
done in spite of him — his whole position had changed. 
He was permitted to pass from opposition to action : 
the price to be paid for mingling with the Commune, 
and for accepting Paris and violence was his old consis- 
tency; he paid it. He consented to become in part the 
mouthpiece of that violence, in part only did he remain 
the professor and logician of the strict revolutionary 
theory. This compromise made him, long before 
January, the chief target of the moderates : of the pure 
visionaries, the great souls that surrounded Vergniaud. 
Having been singled out for their principal attack, he 
could not fail to reap the fruits of any victory against 
them. When months later the Gironde disappeared, as 
it was fated to disappear, it was to the profit especially of 
Robespierre who had not grasped the nature of its peril, 
who had attacked it only in debate. 

The February of 1793 was an empty month of 
silence. That silence covered the slow convergence of 
the coalition. It was the moment of leisurely preparation 
with which the eighteenth century had hitherto intro- 
duced its wars^ and corresponding to that leisure dragged 
on in Paris the sluggish inefiiciency of the ministry and 
their supporters. The thing that was to overthrow them 
was indeed gathering in strength and unity : the Com- 
mune, re-ele(Cted in December, full of complaint and anger, 

1 Barbaroux was a vain, courageous, young and sensitive hero, as full of 
exaggeration as any other poet, but there is substantial truth in his 
account of his interview with Robespierre in the house of the Duplays, 
in his disgust at "the Shrine," and in his mention of Madame 
Duplay's protest that an insurrection would result in the death of Robes- 
pierre. 

^ For instance : war is declared on England and Holland on February 
2. No general action is fought for weeks upon weeks. Spain with- 
draws her ambassador, yet there is no state of war till March 8. 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 235 

an illiterate^ populace, had had, though illiterate, a 
Girondin for its mayor, an excellent, respectable and 
rather famous doctor, one Chambon.^ He had resigned 
the incongruous post and Pache had replaced him : Pache 
who had passed from the ministry of war, who felt the 
danger and was angered by the lack of control over the 
armies. That enduring thorn of the Revolution, famine, 
troubled Paris to the disorders of the 25 th : the Jacobins 
meddled with "a republican constitution"; in the last 
days of the month the questions on the situation of the 
army were growing urgent : little groups threatened 
order in the streets. But as a whole the note of 
February was silence. 

What had passed under the feeble hand of Roland, 
the ineptitude of Beurnonville ^ at the War Office, the 
intrigue of Dumouriez ? There had arisen a combination 
of follies that promised the immediate success of the 
European governments and the overthrow of the Revolu- 
tion. These follies had a common centre ; they proceeded 
from a common but heroic folly, the deliberate theory of 
the Girondins and their refusal to touch earth. That party 
would not move by an inch out of those traditions of '9 1 
and '92, the traditions of pure freedom, which were sacred 
to them in every circumstance, to which they could 
admit no exception even to save freedom itself. All the 

^ It is interesting to mark in the documents the gulf that lay between 
the insurrectionary Commune of the loth of August (lawyers, doctors and 
dons) and that of December which was the practical result of their egali- 
tarian theory and was purely popular. It is hardly an exaggeration to 
say that there is misspelling in erery document issued from the H6tel de 
Ville during the ensuing eighteen months. 

" A curious career ! He resigned a month after his election and took 
to writing of obstetrics, became an authority thereon, and died, secure in 
that wholly professional reputation, in 1826. 

• Beurnonville is still a kind of byword for inefficiency in the French 
army. I quote from Boursier's book the famous despatch of the victory 
in which the loss of his brigade was " One drummer boy : slightly 
wounded : Thumb." Unused to colonial warfare, the French discover 
nothing but the comic in such despatches. 



236 ROBESPIERRE 

accidents of Freedom — the local autonomy, the power of 
the towns and the departments over their own resources, 
the voluntary recruiting of the army, the absolute in- 
dependence of the law courts — things necessary to their 
perfect state — they refused to touch under any plea 
of emergency. Round the dwindling majority of such 
recalcitrance or prepossession Paris moved uneasily like 
the sea swelling under a false calm. 

Questions began to be asked, the answers to them 
were delayed. The condition of the army was doubted. 
Was its wastage replaced ? Had its discipline stood the 
inaction of the winter ? Had the reinforcements Danton 
urged and carried passed beyond the mere vote ? Were 
they in being ? Had the Gironde, whose whole creed — 
never abandoned, leading them unchanged to the guillo- 
tine — was liberty, had they enforced the harsh decrees 
that pressed goods and men for the war ? They were 
the Government, and their answers meant nothing. 

There is this fatality attaching to the weak govern- 
ment of a great state, whether its faults be those of 
an untenable, untimely enthusiasm or those of sheer 
mediocrity, that its disasters cannot but be cumulative 
and reach a climax. It has no power of slowly retrieving 
its errors : the consequences of its folly heap up with an 
uncontrollable rapidity, propagating themselves. So it 
was with the Girondins. All February those great 
orators, full of the god, stood steadfast and disdainful 
before the menace of Paris, wrapped up in a vision of 
the Republic that should destroy the kings. And March 
answered all these questions which they had thought 
mere faction: which even from the mouth of Danton, 
returned from Belgium and almost the emissary of 
Dumouriez, they had refused to treat as a sign of the 
national danger. 

The roll of evil news came in with the first days 
of the month; it continued uninterrupted, vastly in- 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 237 

creasing till at its close sheer necessity and the immin- 
ence of death produced the Terror. On the 3rd Vendee 
rose, on the 4th the Austrians broke the French line 
in the north (how wastage had thinned it !), all the 5 th 
and 6th Liege the republican, the one city that was a 
thorough friend in Belgium, ran bodily across the snow, 
men, women, and children, following the French rout, and 
flying from the old Austrian master, from the charge of 
the Hungarian sabres. At the opening of that week 
(Sunday, the 3rd) Brittany first moved ; before its close 
the gathering reaction at Lyons reached its head; the 
royalists, the failing rich, the unemployed, the devout, 
all the enemies of the new and dreadful aspect of the 
armed Revolution, gave themselves a mayor who was 
a symbol of civil war. Unhappily for the Gironde, 
every man in France that regretted Privilege and the 
King called himself " Girondin." Lyons was within a 
few weeks of entrenching against the Republic. 

On Thursday the 8 th (all this being still rumour, 
either unknown or casting only a very vague, uneasy 
panic before it) Danton and Lacroix together challenged 
the government in the Parliament. " Tell us exactly 
the situation of the armies. Relieve the doubts of the 
city." Then as the executive refused to speak, these two 
men, the commissaries from Belgium, said that since the 
government was silent they would tell the whole story. 
Lacroix especially, the soldier, striking at the unsoldierly 
Beurnonville, implored action. He described the break- 
up of discipline in the winter, the quarrels and the 
doubts of Belgium, the rags and the hunger in the lines, 
the numbers of an orderly and veteran enemy rising 
against them continually. 

"You decreed thirty thousand reinforcements. The 
army has received none." 

And this piece of rhetoric was nearly true. Compulsion 
alone could raise all the drafts needed for this struggle — > 



238 ROBESPIERRE 

a nation of civilians has never understood wliat is meant 
by the losses of an army at the front. But compulsion 
was odious and impossible to the Gironde. 

This debate roused the Commune. Next day, Friday, 
and all Saturday the great black flag flapped in the 
driving wind from the towers of Notre Dame. The 
University saw it in the sky, the slums of the Boucherie 
saw it ; the gunners out by the Invalides could not loose 
its little distant mark from their minds. The Faubourg 
St. Antoine down its narrow streets leading to the river 
(streets that frame the cathedral beyond) saw it and 
moved; all Paris began moving. Men went out from 
section to section calling for volunteers, saying there was 
not a moment, that Paris alone knew the truth, that the 
provinces would be too late. As the undetermined 
questioning crowd gathered outside the Hotel de Ville, it 
could only find for its orders, like a pall, the great dark 
cloth covering the face of the building, and sewed on 
to it hugely in staring white letters the word " Danger " : 
the motto that had introduced September. 

Yet a perilous lethargy hung over the capital. The 
streets filled, there were cries for massacre in the Jacobins 
(and the Jacobins condemned the cries), but no single 
will impelled the thousands, they could find no point 
of attack, they eddied furiously upon themselves. 

The Gironde feared a second September, and knew 
that this time they might be the victims. Louvet, not 
a cowardly man, went to the brave but cautious Petion 
by night and told him that some one at the Jacobins 
had cried for " the purging of the Parliament." Potion 
opened his window and thrust out his hand into the 
darkness. " Nothing will be done," he answered ; " it is 
raining." 

Nor was anything done of what was feared. Some 
hundreds broke into the printing oflSces of the Gironde's 
papers and destroyed the presses. Some hundreds 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 239 

massed uncertainly near the Tuileries. On the next 
day, Sunday, the i oth, the Gironde still feared violence ; 
in the debate that was the first step towards the 
Terror, their benches on the right were empty, and the 
extremists had no obstacle between them and 
the application of their remedy. If a tradition may 
be trusted, Vergniaud sat there alone with a great 
empty space about and behind him, making it his duty 
to protest even in that crisis against the stabbing of 
Liberty; but his protest led nowhere. For there was 
instituted, towards midnight on that Sunday, the high 
court that was to be the sword of the Terror: the 
Kevolutionary Tribunal. The Commune had put its 
first pressure upon the Convention and a united govern- 
ment was begun. 

It was Lindet's proposal — it might have come from 
almost any part of the half-empty hall. Only Vergniaud, 
proudly and defiantly sustained in its last hour, the 
theory of his band, the pure Republic. He moved that 
the voting should be by a roll-call of names. 

" We wish to see who they are," he called through the 
silence, " that talk of killing Freedom in the name of 
Freedom." 

The solemnity of that special voting could not affect 
the issue. One man even, desperate for a dictatorship 
that should save the country, opposed the nomination of 
a jury. The Convention dared not go so far. As it 
was, the judges were to be named by the Convention, 
the jury were to be chosen from Paris and the home 
departments — that was enough despotism even for such 
a moment. Before the dawn of Monday the Republic 
had been given its most un-republican instrument. 

Sprung from the night and from peril, full of the 
inner fire of the Revolution, this tribunal needed but a 
motive power to send it out against the rebellion and 
against the kings. That spirit of hfe which was breathed 



240 ROBESPIERRE 

into it at last was tlie Great Committee. For the Great 
Committee was to prove the swordsman capable of using 
such a sword. Let me pursue the rapid and over- 
whelming month that created it.^ 

Even as they were voting the establishment of the 
court for treason Vendee had instituted a tribunal of 
her own, and at Machecoul had massacred the re- 
publicans. That was on the evening of the Sunday; 
on the Tuesday Dumouriez had issued and posted 
throughout Belgium a letter of revolt which has been 
condemned by many historians, but which was not without 
a great excuse, nor without its basis of truth. It said 
virtually, " I have failed, but the reason I have failed is 
that you have attempted I know not what insane crusade 
unknown to military history and lacking military know- 
ledge. You have pillaged the churches, ridden over 
the people, and with that refused reintorcements. You 
have tried to make great phrases do the work of men." 
So frightened was the Gironde of what the publication of 
this letter might rouse in Paris that the government 
withheld it and kept it secret for a fortnight.^ 

Meanwhile the last and greatest blow fell upon this 
critical opening of the year. A week after writing that 
letter, half in treason, with an alternative policy in case 
of failure, but doubtless determined to win, Dumouriez 
assaulted the heights of Neerwinden. One portion of 
his army, the left under Miranda,^ fought with stubborn- 

1 As a fact, the revolutionary tribunal, though decreed on March lo, 
did not begin sitting till April 2, and tried no case until the Committee 
of Public Safety had been formed. 

2 It was not published in Paris till March 26, but it was posted all 
over Brussels on March 12, the day it was written : from which dis- 
crepancy in dates it is argued that Dumouriez was already keeping a gate 
open for his later betrayal. So he was, as is proved by his publishing the 
letter in Brussels as a proclamation ; but historians forget that it reached 
the government in Paris as early as the 15th. 

2 Miranda, a Peruvian, was valiant even for that valiant mixture of 
the Indian and the Spaniard. He was nothing but a soldier of fortune ; 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 241 

ness; it was opposed to tlie massed batteries of the 
Austrian right where the young Prince Charles was 
making his fictitious reputation at the head of the 
strongest position in the field. For seven hours Miranda 
broke himself without support or reserve up the slopes 
of the hill and against the concentrated fire. It may or 
may not have been the truth that Dumouriez was 
successful upon the right ; ^ it is certainly true that he 
hated Miranda, that he had put Miranda upon the , left 
with insufficient forces and that on Miranda's retreat he 
was himself compelled to fall back from the village that 
he was disputing. 

The retreat was conducted without disorder, Du- 
mouriez had made up his mind to treason. For a 
fortnight he parleyed easily with the enemy, taking 
them into his confidence, and turning them into a kind 
of allies. 

During that period of doubt and fury, the Convention, 
still Girondin by its majority and bewildered, turned 
upon Danton. The one man who might have saved the 
unity of the Convention and who was willing to have 
made a buckler for the Girondins passed on the i st April 
through a fire of taunt and invective that drove him for 
the moment into a frenzy. 

It was upon that complex and perilous situation — the 
government known to be feeble, losing its majority; the 
strongest man on the Left suspected of complicity with 
a doubtful general; the Commune, crying out loudly 
against the inefficiency of the executive and willing to 
give almost any blow anywhere so that it could strike 
energy into the conduct of affairs — it was upon such a 

fought for Guatemala, enlisted with the revolutionary French armies, 
returned to South America and helped the rebellions. He was taken 
by the Spaniards and died in prison at Cadiz in 1816. 

^ The evidence even on that plain point is not convincing. The most 
favourable to Dumouriez is the account in bis own memoirs. 



242 ROBESPIERRE 

welter that tliere fell the news of Dumouriez' treason. 
He had gone over to the enemy, despairing of the 
Revolution. His army had refused to follow; even the 
three German-speaking regiments, over whom the young 
Due de Chartres hoped to exercise some influence, had 
remained loyal. 

The supreme peril of revolutionary France has been 
variously placed by historians at several dates; it has 
been placed at the crisis of early September '92, when 
Brunswick had turned the position of the Argonne and 
was marching upon Paris; but at that time winter was 
on the side of the French, and Brunswick's army was 
but a vanguard of the great wars. It has been placed 
at the fall of Valenciennes in July '93 : but at that time 
the Terror was alive; a dictatorship compelling armies 
and raising men daily by regiments out of the ground. 
I would rather put it at this moment of Dumouriez' 
treason. The crisis had in it something moral, more 
dangerous than anything that preceded or came after; 
it was evident that this great cavalry soldier, a man for a 
long time not without hope of glory in the revolutionary 
career, had shrugged his shoulders, despaired of doing 
anything more with such levies as the French had been 
reduced to and had thought the nation itself destroyed. 

There was something of that despair over the town of 
Paris. There was not in France one body apparently that 
was ready to take up vigorously and to organise the 
immediate necessities of the national defence. The 
government to whom that duty fell were a group of 
men embedded in a violent quarrel with the capital, 
afraid that at any moment an abortive insurrection like 
that of the loth of March might turn into a massacre 
like that of the previous September. The one man that 
had in him the power of organisation and the conquering 
energy to effect the transformation that was needed, 
Danton, was for the moment at the ban. He had re- 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 243 

turned from Belgium as the apologist of Dumouriez, 
never doubting of his loyalty, determined to preserve the 
only soldier left to the country; he had but barely 
escaped from the storm of the ist of April when the 
treason of Dumouriez was known in Paris. It seemed to 
overwhelm him. 

It was a feature peculiar to the Revolution even in 
these moments of paralysis that, until its whole work 
was done, unsuspected springs of energy were never 
wanting to it ; it had the power of resurrection. There 
lay always beneath the alternate frigidity and chaos of its 
public a national force which could not but express itself 
somewhere, now through the Commune, now through the 
Parliament, now through a crowd. It is this permanent 
gift of self- creation which has done most to lend to the 
Revolution in the eyes of the French its legend of the 
fatal and the superhuman. 

In this April, when the Commune had nothing to 
suggest, when the crowds had abandoned the streets, 
when Paris was deserted, and the Parliament hope- 
lessly divided, it was out of that divided Parlia- 
ment that the life-giving thing was to come. And 
it is typical of the impersonal forces which drove these 
men in spite of themselves that the two statesmen who 
on the 5 th and 6th of April created the Committee 
of Public Safety came from opposing sides: each a 
member of violent parties which one would have 
thought interlocked and merely wrestling, and made 
useless by the violence of their struggle. It was Isnard, 
the full Girondin, that proposed ; it was Danton that, by 
his support, carried the proposition to form the great 
committee, and when it was formed, France had been 
given a centre, an organ of national will, that, in changing 
forms, was to lead at last twelve hundred thousand men 
past the frontiers and on into the capitals of the kings. 

It is astonishing how little Robespierre either said or 



244 ROBESPIERRE 

did in tlie short two months that created this dictatorship 
upon the ruins and anarchy following Louis' execution. 
He proposes nothing, he does nothing ; even his standing 
quarrel with the Girondins is carried on with less per- 
tinacity and in a kind of bewilderment. He does not 
know himself; and, untrue as the criticism was when it 
was made, he gives support to the accusation of Condorcet 
that the approach of danger rendered him silent. With 
the making of the Committee of Public Safety he had 
nothing whatsoever to do. The hammering out of the 
new weapon, the value of the debate, passed him by and 
seemed meaningless to him, as the action of a sculptor 
would pass by a man wholly ignorant of the arts; yet 
this newly created thing in whose making he had done 
nothing was to be the principal instrument of his final 
domination. Once it was made he watched it, pressed 
upon it, at last entered it, and with the despotic power it 
gave its members, abusing somewhat the public illusion 
as to his domination of it, it was as a member of the 
Committee of Public Safety that, a year after, he pre- 
tended to rule France. 

The vote was taken and a little body of nine men, 
debating in secret, linked closely by common labours, 
alone instructed upon the whole situation of the country, 
besran to change and canalise the course of the revolu- 
tionary flood. Why was that date the origin of a new 
thing; the gate of the Terror, and, for that matter, of 
the victories ? Because the moment the Committee was 
formed it was inevitable that power should concentrate 
in its hands, and in developing my thesis of the false 
position which Robespierre came to occupy in the State 
I must describe the nature of this despotism whose advent 
I have called inevitable. 

When a country is by tradition centralised, that is, 
when it has got rid of class government, when the con- 
nection between the citizen and government works directly 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 245 

along known channels, whose direction is defined not by 
custom but by law and which converge to one source 
of authority, it is evident that whatever name you give 
to the chiefs of the bureaucracy, those chiefs will be the 
trustees of Government. Centralisation demands too 
vast an army of oflEicials and too strict a discipline to 
permit of indirect pressure by the rich upon this or that 
part of the machine. It is highly representative, its 
personnel is drawn from every class, it protects public 
interests: but it is absolute. You may surround the 
institution with careful safeguards, you may have (as 
you have in modern France) a social spirit which puts 
that great machine into the hands of unambitious, 
devoted, and similar men ; or it may happen, as it has 
happened once or twice in the military crises of the 
nation, that genius and creative power seize upon it, 
making its mastery more evident, more picturesque, and 
for the moment more useful. But whatever it is that 
holds the threads at the centre, that thing, passively or 
actively governs France. 

An Englishman will understand this foreign condition 
more easily if he considers the vaguer forces that deter- 
mine the fortunes of his own country. Make certain that 
a spirit is leavening the public schools, or that some philo- 
sophy has captured the universities ; appreciate the tone 
in which the rich talk of the new rich whom they have 
to assimilate ; hear the decisions of the few men who 
control our press, and you have arrived at a knowledge 
of what turn the whole Empire will take. 

To leave this metaphor, which might prove a source 
less of conviction than of irritation, and to return to the 
nature of the Government without which the French 
would feel they had lost their civilisation, consider in 
what necessity the Committee of Public Safety arose. For 
more than six months France had been in the hands 
of the feeblest of governments. Until the fall of the 



246 ROBESPIERRE 

monarcliy there was, however mucli we talk about tlie 
King's being a prisoner or about the licence of the 
Jacobins, a definite governing power in the Tuileries, which 
power gave its orders to the whole machinery of France ; 
indeed it was because that power was so definite — con- 
trolled the armies, appointed the administration — and 
because it was so palpably opposed to the national spirit 
that an armed attack had to be made upon it. What 
could not be abolished by a vote had to fall on the issue 
of a battle. When it was gone, and after the short 
interlude of vigour which Danton presided, and whose 
name is Valmy, the armies indeed continued to protect 
France from invasion, but the hold of the Government over 
the nation was failing. The Constitution of '9 1 was de- 
signed for a time of peace. Liberal, almost American in its 
provision for local autonomy, it gave no machinery for the 
binding of the fasces of the nation, or for sending it in 
a mass against the enemy. Moreover, the energy of the 
Girondins was taken up in an incessant defence against 
the great capital that surrounded and would oppress the 
majority of the Parliament. The ministry of Roland 
was unable to command its generals, to levy its taxes, 
to compel the enlistment of reinforcements ; the result 
had been the breakdown of March. 

Perhaps the best evidence of the anarchy of the 
situation was the state of mind in which men had lived 
through the 9th and loth of that month. Would 
Paris rise ? Would there be a massacre ? Of whom ? 
That all these questions had been asked was sufficient 
proof that as there was no government to enforce the 
levies and munitions, so there was no power strong 
enough to prevent a repetition of September. 

Now in April with the formation of the two engines 
of the Terror, the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Com- 
mittee of Public Safety, this anarchy ended. The Terror 
was not an anarchy, it was a despotism ; the appreciation 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 247 

of that truth is the appreciation of the latter revolution. 
It was more than a despotism — it was a military dic- 
tatorship. For two months the nine men who had been 
given such ample powers had passing through their 
hands the nomination of all officers, the reports of all 
spies and agents, the accounts of all the arsenals and 
depots, the establishment of all the munitions of war. 
They were supposed only to survey and to check ; they 
very quickly became the only possible government. For 
it was they that saw with the clearest vision the extreme 
peril of the nation, and it was known that they alone 
could appreciate the situation of France. So rapidly 
did their power grow, in these two months, that I 
would even go so far as to call them the authors of the 
weakening of the Parliament; they thought it a last 
resource for the strengthening of the nation. For it 
seems to me that the report of the 29th of May, in 
which the committee sifted and exposed the breakdown 
of the national forces, was the trumpet-call which led to 
the mutilation of the Convention three days later. I 
would fix the room where Danton and his colleagues sat 
organising the beginning of the national defence, and 
take it as the point of view from which the distorted 
accident of the insurrection of the 2nd of June falls into 
perspective. 

Side by side with that hidden but fundamental 
power, trailed on the last quarrels of Paris and the 
Gironde. The Gironde, seven days^ after the formation 
of the committee, sent Marat before the Revolutionary 
Tribunal. The Revolutionary Tribunal was Parisian, and 
acquitted Marat. 

On the 1 5 th, Pache, the Mayor of Paris, read at 
the bar of the Convention a demand on the part of 
the Commons for the removal of twenty- two Girondin 

^ 13th of April, by 220 to 92. But over a hundred members of the 
Badical Left were away on mission to the armies. 



248 ROBESPIERRE 

deputies; on the i8tli the Commune declared itself 
insurrectionary — that is, no longer responsible to the 
National Parliament, but taking order and counsel as 
it chose. A month the two forces faced each other. 
Then, with the close of May, with the coming in of the 
warm season and the flowering of '93, the Gironde that 
had made such a stout battle for legality fell. 

It was on the 17th of May that the Commune united 
its armed force, chose a general for it, and prepared for 
action. The Gironde countered (still meeting arms with 
laws) by naming, next day, a committee of twelve that 
should report upon the illegalities committed by the town. 
The committee reported openly that the Commune was 
conspiring against the whole system of national repre- 
sentation, it demanded an increased guard for the Parlia- 
ment, and it arrested Herbert — which was like arresting 
the Commune in the flesh. On the 2 5 th Isnard, from the 
chair, rose before a mass of petitionaries (who were still de- 
manding the dismissal or abstention of the twenty-two), 
and cried with doom in his deep voice : " If the national 
representation be touched, I tell you in the name of all 
France that men will soon be looking along the banks 
of the river to find if Paris had ever stood by the Seine." 

Nothing after this could save the integrity of the 
Parliament. The Commune, from a common and furious 
enemy, became an enemy specially menaced and insulted ; 
within a week it had broken its opponent. 

The story of that day of revolt, though Robespierre 
himself appeared in it so little, merits the telling, for it 
was the victory of his party. 

Disaster upon disaster, the victorious march of the 
Vendeans, the besieging of Valenciennes (the last for- 
tress), culminated in the explosion at Lyons and the 
massacre of the Jacobins in that town ; the news of this 
reached Paris on the morning that the Convention was 
attacked. 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 249 

Already, tliree days before, mobs bad moved against 
it, bad broken its doors, bad mixed witb the Assembly, 
voting with them in a farcical turmoil, and crying out 
against the insult offered to the city by the Government's 
action in arresting Herbert. The irregular committee at 
the Evech^ had, partly by threats, partly by ruse, pro- 
duced an apparent unanimity among the sections. A 
chance soldier that had never yet been a soldier, Han- 
riot,^ was at the head of 120 cannon, and led the few 
hundreds of armed men that appeared in the court of 
the Carrousel on the morning of the 2nd of June. 

There was a long comedy played before the Parliament 
accepted its humiliation. Herault de Sechelles, the 
Speaker, proposed to go out and meet and parley with the 
enemy; thirty members of the Mountain sat unmoved 
upon his left, and saw defile before them the uncertain 
hundreds of the Convention. They knew that a capitu- 
lation could be the only end. In the Carrousel, under 
the sunlight, Hanriot at the head of the troops reiterated 
the plain demand of the extremists of the city for the 
destruction of the Gironde: "You have no orders to 
give. Hand over to the people the victims they have 
demanded." 

The Convention did not immediately return to debate 
upon its own humiliation. It passed through the centre 
of the palace to the terrace overlooking the garden, as 
though to find help from the National Guard that were 
massed in the distance, and whose doubtful attitude 
might, had there been sufficient determination in the 
Parliament, have been converted into a defence of that 
body. They re-entered the theatre to find it invaded by 
the crowd in arms, and then necessity compelled them 

^ An irregular appointment, purely popular. Hanriot was one of the 
few leaders of the Eevolution that had no pretension to birth or letters. 
He had been first a servant, then a player in village fairs. He was a 
drunkard, and very courageous. 



ISO ROBESPIERRE 

to the self-destruction from which they never raised 
themselves till the fall of Eobespierre. 

With the populace sitting on the benches beside 
them (even voting), with the President suggesting names 
to be added or cancelled, the Committee of Twelve was 
broken and the twenty-two deputies that the Commune 
had continually demanded were voted under arrest. Some 
had already been willing to resign ; others, like Lanjuinais 
the Breton (a man proud of his memories), had inflexibly 
remained at their post, defining themselves as members and 
limbs of the People, part of the sovereign, an indivisible 
portion of the general rule. Others had fled. But every 
suggestion to mitigate the full evil of that day had been 
made and had failed. Danton had proposed himself a 
hostage ; the Commune had even been willing to ofier 
as security for the lives of the members that were ex- 
pelled a similar number of their own leaders. And this 
also should be remarked, that though the Gironde was 
sacrificed, no one dared go beyond the proposition that 
they should remain under arrest in their own houses. 

Nevertheless, in spite of all the mitigations which 
surrounded the fate of the Gironde at that moment, it 
was evident that the Parliament had consented to pass 
under a yoke. It did many great things after that ; it 
saved the unity of the nation ; it may be said to have 
led the army in the person of its deputies on mission. 
It established a hundred of the national institutions, 
especially the great schools ; it registered that constitu- 
tion which was never put in force, but which surely 
marks the most complete scheme of democracy. It was 
the Convention that made modern France, and Napoleon 
did nothing save defend and organise its work ; but in 
spite of all this it lived for a year in servitude. The 
Committee, and side by side with the Committee, first 
the Herbertists, then the Terror, and at last in a fashion 
Robespierre, ruled it. 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 251 

With the 2nd of June once more Robespierre in- 
creased, as, by a kind of fatality, he increased regularly 
with every great day of the Revolution. 

The arrest of the Girondins and the evident failure 
of the Convention, was so profitable to the Jacobins, 
and therefore to Robespierre, that he is regarded with 
too general a consent as in some part its author. It 
was so evidently the close of his two years' battle with 
the Rolands, and seemed so complete a revenge for the 
insults of the preceding autumn that many see him 
planning it. That is a misreading of history. Robespierre, 
through the whole of April and May, continued his speeches 
upon the most abstract matters. Every time indeed that 
Paris growled at the remaining power of the Gironde, 
Robespierre at once took up her complaint and urged their 
retirement. He was ready to be the organ of the Jacobins 
in insisting upon the paralysis that the twenty-two laid 
upon the country, and he was especially himself when he 
argued against Danton's attempt to conciliate them. But 
he did not go to the Evech^, he gave no orders, and he 
eould furnish no suggestion save that of " a moral in- 
surrection " against men who had for months resisted the 
open threat of massacre. 

It was the Committee that permitted or made the 
2nd of June ; the Committee was already the executive, 
stronger even than the Commune. And this the whole 
character of the day proves. 

The insurrection had in it something unreal; Paris 
did not really move. Robespierre the younger said more 
than he meant when he marvelled at "a hundred 
thousand under arms and no blood spilt." The supreme 
folly of the Gironde and of their futile Twelve in sending 
Marat to the Revolutionary Tribunal and to triumphant 
acquittal, their blindness in arresting Herbert for an 
attack upon their party in the Pere Duchesne, would 
not in itself have done the work. In this great city of 



252 ROBESPIERRE 

three-quarters of a million souls, of 200,000 men, it may 
be doubted if 5000 met in the sections on the night 
that determined the insurrection against the Parliament. 
But Paris inert had agreed with Paris active. The 
Committee also saw that France under the Gironde lay- 
open ; it could not forbear to save the country in spite of 
the law. 

It may be asked in what way the fall of the Gironde 
left Robespierre higher than it found him. It was by 
leaving to the Jacobins the initiative in pure politics. The 
great Committee would order the armies and the arrests, 
but upon all the general legislation of the moment it was 
the club of the Rue St. Honore that led the debates and 
framed the laws. From that date it dictated them to 
the Parliament. Now Robespierre was the head of the 
club, its chief exponent ; and the ramifications which the 
society sent out throughout France met in his hands or 
were known to lie under his central influence. This it 
is which explains the innumerable letters and appeals 
which begin from that moment to accumulate in the 
house of Duplay ; he was the moral head of an organisa- 
tion that held the country by a thousand local threads. 
Separate from and superior to that organisation had stood 
the authority of the Parliament, and when, with the 
elimination of the twenty-two, the Parliament sank, the 
Jacobins assumed control of all save the executive of the 
Revolution. They drafted the new fundamental laws, 
they rehearsed the debates of the Convention, they be- 
came the arena. 

An example of the change may be found in Robes- 
pierre's " Declaration of the Rights of Man." It had 
been nothing but an academic essay a few Aveeks before ; 
he had made no attempt to turn it into a bill, it had 
delighted the Jacobins as a literary rather than a political 
effort ; but after the 2nd of June, when the new constitu- 
tion was discussed, this essay became a code. 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 253 

And there was that other force always helping 
Robespierre : helping him now. Paris took for her 
permanent ensign a name which had been mixed longest 
with hers, the name of the man who had led in phrases 
her attack upon the Gironde, the name which the Gironde 
itself had consented to regard as that of its principal 
enemy. And hence Robespierre becomes, as it were, the 
title of unity ; the head under which men looked for the 
resistance to Federalism, and the consistent landmark to 
which the Republic turned in the fierce defence of that 
unity which it made during the ensuing year. 

And he on his side began to watch with more keen- 
ness the growth of his popularity from the immense to 
the universal. He gave himself a master, consented to 
attune everything he did to this public reputation, and 
served almost abjectly his own hunger for a popular name. 
It is characteristic of him here, as in his whole career, 
that he hesitated before action ; rather permitted action 
to be thrust upon him. The pressure was irresistible. 
On the eve of the insurrection his two friends, his fore- 
runners, St. Just and Couthon, entered the Committee of 
Public Safety.-^ He himself for seven weeks more sat 
watching from without, receiving the reports from their 
lips, and ready when the door was quite opened to him, 
to enter. 

It is of interest to note the manner in which the 
pressure was exercised. Throughout the month of June 
he debates, criticises, judges the new constitution, which 
was to have been put in force with the cessation of the 
war. That constitution was an instrument of the gravest 
importance. It was taken to be the final pact between 
the nation and the Revolution, to be the final work of 
democracy. There has been raised against it the com- 
plaint that it was drawn up in a few days as a momen- 
tous expedient in order to appease the anger of the 

* Added with three others to the original nine on May 30. 



254 ROBESPIERRE 

departments wliose members liad been expelled and who 
were already arming to attack Paris : this opinion has 
thrown it into some contempt and neglect, but it is false. 
This constitution, which, if it be examined, will be found 
to be as complete a model of democracy as that of any 
of the western states of America, was the labour of over 
six months in committee, it was but the last forms and 
half a score of additional clauses that were the result of 
the crisis, and even these were nothing new in character ; 
they were only the reiteration of principles already deter- 
mined, but with regard to which the revolt of Normandy, 
of Lyons, of Bordeaux, necessitated a more emphatic 
declaration. 

During these debates Robespierre took on an attitude 
of censor which no one withstood, and which was witness 
to the accession of power the fall of the Gironde had 
brought him. He was not in opposition ; on the contrary, 
the Constitution was so full of his own spirit, of the 
Jacobin essay, that he had no motive to do anything 
but applaud — his daily speech with its daily reservations, 
doubts, and revisions (often just and clear-sighted) was 
but the more evidently an advertisement. He opposed 
just so much as a man may who has no purpose in 
opposing at all, and by that action betrayed his motive. 
The whole was judicial, calm, and pedantic in the true 
Jacobin tradition. 

Did Rouffron suggest that the inviolability of repre- 
sentatives was a danger ? Robespierre defended that in- 
violability with every circumstance of careful reasoning 
and deference to Rouffron's age : called him " le digne 
veillard," and strung out at immense length all the 
arguments in favour of immunity with which the con- 
stitutional lawyers of this country had provided the 
Revolution. 

Did the Committee suggest that the electors of every 
commune could be called together at any time by the 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 255 

demand of a certain number among tliem ? Robespierre 
gave bis reasons for fixed dates alone being retained, and 
when there was a feeling in the committee in favour of 
"arbiters" — chance judges chosen by the parties to settle 
commercial disputes — Robespierre demanded regular 
magistrates ; and the spring of all these preachings, petty 
amendments and essays was his determination to press 
upon the Committee ; to establish his mastery by 
reiteration. 

The time was propitious. There was but one man 
that could have been to him at that moment, not an 
adversary indeed, but a rival, and Danton a man of wide 
view and therefore with no following, a man who was so 
bent upon the danger, the civil war and the invasion as 
to be consumed with action, was failing. The great 
fatigues were falling upon him with the full summer, and 
he let drop out of his hand the lever of government 
which he had now twice grasped — in the August of the 
past year and now in this April — a man so evidently 
made to govern that every one was glad when he con- 
sented to command. Not only was he failing in political 
activity, turned inward upon himself, dragged back by 
the memories of his wife, and (full of her last advice) 
preparing a second marriage, but he had also in him a 
distaste for political speeches. Robespierre, " whom his 
congregation asks to speak and who speaks continuously," 
filled up and occupied all the scene. In a time which 
still had a passion for hearing its dogmas asserted, re- 
asserted, developed, declaimed ; before an audience that 
by the accident of the Jacobin organisation held the 
nation, and that was just so near to mediocrity as to 
demand sermons, he held his pulpit and professed. In the 
vigorous and exaggerated phrase of Michelet, " Danton 
looked at the perpetual movement and tremor of those 
jaws and felt that they were eating him up." 

The result was certain. On the loth of July the 



256 ROBESPIERRE 

Committee — that is, Danton — resigned; in a fortnight 
the new Committee was named and Robespierre was a 
member of it. 

This was the result which Robespierre's watching for 
all this while, his pressing upon the doors of govern- 
ment by a combination of insistence and vigilance, his 
monotony, his popularity and his repeatedly verified sus- 
picions, had drawn from the Parliament. By a curious 
fatality the date of his entry into the Committee was 
exactly a year to a day before the moment that threw 
him from power. 

There is very little truth in his contention that he 
entered with reluctance upon the responsibilities of power. 
He was proposed by a man fully in his confidence, 
thoroughly his friend ; a man who a few days before and 
a few days later, was to appear as his principal supporter in 
the affair of Custine. He entered it as the only member 
who would under the circumstances be supported by at 
least two other members, satellites, Couthon and St. Just ; 
what was called with some exaggeration, the Triumvirate. 

Nevertheless, when he said that he was reluctant to 
take office in the circumstances of the Terror (and under 
the immediate memory of the death of Marat), it was not 
a hypocritical speech ; it was the expression of something 
that certainly always lay in his mind — the desire to be 
free to criticise, to exercise a sovereignty wholly moral, 
and the instinct that his power lay in opposition. He 
was indeed able for a year to build up the foundations of 
positive action, but his very fibre told him the whole 
time that such an effort on the part of such a man as he, 
could not finally succeed. 

I have said that Danton, wearied, already ill, oppressed 
by the fears and feverish heat which were mixed up with 
the growing Terror, had slipped from government. He 
had used this great instrument of the arbitrary Com- 
mittee which covered all Prance with a buckler, en- 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 257 

forced unity and fed the armies, doing its work as piti- 
lessly as a conqueror or as the devastations of nature. It 
was in his character, its great energies and its necessities 
for repose, to let drop almost at the moment of its crea- 
tion the levers of the thing he had made. His heart was 
troubled. The imprisoned Girondins, with whom he had 
partly lived, and between whom and the Mountain he 
twice offered to throw a bridge, haunted him. The 
increasing momentum of the Terror, escaping control and 
becoming a frenzy, terrified him ; it was the first thing he 
had yet come upon in his powerful life of which he felt him- 
self unable to be a master ; nor does anything bewilder and 
weaken men of strong simplicity more than the presence 
of a force stronger and simpler than themselves. To this 
impression of weakness and of despair his fever and his 
sickness added. He lapsed from government, to speak 
only once or twice, with the same principles, but with a 
failing voice, at last to take refuge in his home and in 
the country sides. When he reappeared it was to curb, 
if possible, if not to fall in curbing, the storm which he 
had himself let loose. 

Robespierre replacing him at such a moment (for the 
popular voice counted enormously even in the Committee, 
and even the Committee demanded some head) was a 
man by nature opposed to the Terror, but so much colder 
and self-concentrated than Danton that, for the sake of 
success, he would permit it. Throughout June and July 
it became evident that a man who would appear to govern 
must yield to the crisis. Danton fled from it; Robes- 
pierre, being much less of a man, was content to yield. 

The enemy advanced almost without a check ; Valen- 
ciennes, long besieged, was on the point of falling ; a week 
after the expulsion of the Gironde, the Vendean revolt 
had reached the Loire, Saumur had been taken, and the 
Girondins fanned the furnace. The members who were 
detained in their houses escaped if they chose from the 

B 



258 ROBESPIERRE 

single gendarme that guarded each of them ; those who 
remained, remained only through pride. Petion/ Bar- 
baroux, Guadet, Buzot, and the rest, left Paris at their 
opportunity. They aroused the civil war. 

The Cotentin, which is the garden of the north, 
remained faithful, but Calvados rose ; the town of Caen 
issued a manifesto directly federal, menacing Paris, and 
it armed a battalion to march on the capital. The Eure, 
even Evreux, asleep in its hollow, was awakened ; Buzot 
called up yet another battalion there, and they took the 
road to Paris. Vendt^e was for the King, Central Nor- 
mandy for the pure Republic of the Girondins, but they 
were each opposed to the " monsters " — the legend of the 
anarchy in Paris ; and who could tell that they would not 
join hands ? They were but three long marches one from 
the other. 

On the 24 th of June Amar demanded on the part of the 
lower committee, who were the police, that the Girondins 
remaining should be taken from their nominal arrest and 
imprisoned. On the 8th of July St. Just presented the 
report which has been unjustly accused of severity, and 
which should rather be judged by its principal phrase. 
" If you punish these men, remember that you may not 
punish opinion. Outlaw those who have fled, for they 
are rebels, but try none of those that remain on the score 
of politics." On the same day Condorcet, violent and 
embittered as were all his well-bred clique against the 
Mountain, and who had published a violent attack on 
the Montagnarde constitution, was impeached, and 
fled. 

Wimpfen, from the army of the north, had already 
said that he would " obey the Convention and return to 

1 Potion's flight is typical of the laxity with which the Girondins were 
guarded, and of the lightness of their arrest. He went out to dine with 
a friend. The policeman told off to watch him went down to eat in the 
kitchen, and Potion walked out of the door. In ten days he had raised 
Normandy. 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 259 

Paris, but at the head of 60,000 men." All June and July 
were a challenge, and at the moment that Kobespierre 
entered the committee the violence of the " mad dogs," 
the " enrages,' was coming as surely as the breaking of 
thunder, or the tension of an unnatural day in our 
northern summers. Valenciennes, Cond^, Mayence had 
gone ; Caesar's Camp (as they called it) within a hundred 
miles of Paris, had surrendered. The French in Frank- 
fort had been butchered. For the men that followed 
Herbert, for the extreme men that will in all times of 
revolution preach revolt and that think to find liberty 
in the negation of law, it was a moment of opportunity, 
or (as they doubtless thought it) of providential freedom. 
They began their clamour for mere vengeance ; the fury 
of '93 seized them, and if from some further place their 
souls can remember Europe, they can still boast that they 
created a wild moment in which no restraint stood be- 
tween man instinctive and his complete licence. 

How was that tyranny permitted ? The govern- 
ment a secret thing, hidden in the Committee, the 
government which Danton would have made open and 
the proof of whose existent unity was perhaps not 
evident until Carnot had joined the great committee, 
might, had it been clearly a master, have prevented the 
sudden wind of death that arose as Mediterranean winds 
blow from Africa : the sirocco that made hotter the hot 
month of July and with August and with the first days 
of September was to blast the nation. 

It was not only the danger in which France found 
herself, it was much more the impossibility of driving 
the mad energy of the moment into useful channels 
that pushed things on to their extreme. On either side 
it was the individual that was killing, and there was 
nothing to restrain the individual. In Normandy the 
members of the Gironde who had escaped, inflamed 
one individual soul, the soul of a woman, poor and noble 



26o ROBESPIERRE 

and silent ; she came up to Paris and she killed Marat.^ 
In Lyons it was the individual, the noble or the priest, that 
organised an immediate revolt and killed Chalier. In Paris 
the effect of this was still revenge and individual passion. 
It was Herbert, peculiarly himself, hardly representing a 
community, that pushed on the Terror. It was more 
the terror of opinion and of readiness for evil than of 
acts.^ It was a terror which oppressed the mind and 
prepared it for the madness of the autumn, rather than 
a terror of the revolutionary tribunal; but under the 
pressure of it and for the moment Robespierre sank, 
afraid that were he to oppose it he would be opposing 
something corporate and would be throwing to the winds 
the popularity which, as he thought, already gave him 
the aspect of complete power. 

On this account he would not discover his personal 
action until the end of that violent moment of prepara- 
tion. When he did appear at the end of September it 
was with a certain moderation, but never with that 
control which a wider man would have dared : a control 
that might have saved the Gironde, and that in the 
height of the winter might have admitted the " committee 
of clemency." 

I will attempt to put myself in the shoes of this 
man who, when the fatal violence of '93 rose up in 
eruption, was permitted, and I think was willing, to take 
the helm. He was unworthy of it and perhaps knew 
himself unworthy. He yielded to the pressure, but his 
pedantry had this virtue attached to it, that it permitted 

^ On Marat's death Kobespierre could find no phrase but this : "I am 
myself marked out for daggers." 

' The statistics of the revolutionary tribunal will show what I mean. 
France had been fighting the world since January, yet of death sentences 
there were but 9 in April, 9 in May, 28 in June (of which 20 were for one 
plot), II in July (including Charlotte Corday and the 7 conspirators of 
Orleans), 5 in August, 19 in September. It is an extraordinarily meagre 
list. 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 261 

hiin to be cold and to show his disdain. Roux the wild 
priest he broke ; -^ later in August the same spirit, this 
time erroneous, led him to refuse Danton's proposal — the 
sheer necessity of the time — that the committee (which 
he himself swore never to re-enter) should be recognised 
as the only government. But while the Terror was thus 
distasteful to him, and while he kept up his formula 
even to the refusal of a necessary dictatorship for the 
committee, he had not the general view that would 
have permitted him to organise the awful power of what 
had become a despotism, to turn it against the enemies 
only of the Revolution and to repress, as by his morals 
he desired to repress, the gross licence which boiled up 
with every week of the advancing summer. 

If one might express a longing with regard to deeds 
past and sins inexpiable, the longing would be that two 
things might have happened together : that the Revolt, 
Lyons, Marseilles, Toulon, Vendee, Brittany, Normandy 
might have fallen suddenly (as they would have fallen 
before modern armies and before a modern rapidity of 
communication), and that the genius of Danton had not 
been so mixed with clay nor so mortal : had survived 
the stress of the time and been able before the autumn 
to follow up the domestic victories and to organise the 
full force of the Republic against the invader. 

These things were not permitted. The extreme 
peril of the Revolution endured too long; August and 
September were full of it. The liberty we enjoy was 
defended as in a fortress and encircled upon every side. 
It was thought about to perish and the thought 
maddened.^ You could not go a clear hundred miles 

^ Eoux had'said, " Yours is no democracy because you permit riches." 
It was partly by Danton's act but still more by Robespierre's that he was 
struck off the list of the Cordeliers. 

2 Here is an example of the madness. Therasson proposed that the 
deliberations of the Committee of Public Safety should be Public I It was 
with the greatest difficulty that Robespierre got the proposition rejected. 



262 ROBESPIERRE 

from Paris without finding its enemy marching forward 
and victorious. That situation gave the Herbertists the 
reins of opinion, and all the autumn, half the winter 
became an orgy. Robespierre had not the power to 
resist ; he submitted, and the spirit he hated, the spirit 
he might in a greater mood have resisted, branded him. 
He loved to be called the government. Before the 
spring he was called the Terror. 

There was much beside his ambition that conspired, as 
it were, against his natural fortune. To be master by the 
moral authority of the Jacobins was to hold in one's hands 
the hauls of the great web that covered the towns of 
France; when such a man entered the Committee of 
Public Safety he was thought as a matter of course to be 
master of that also. Then what was he ? Did he not 
hold the whole power ? Pressed by the worst of licence, 
for the moment an unwilling slave of Herbert and his 
madmen he was yet — if he was to call himself the 
master — bound to go with that flood. More than this. 
At the very moment when a general levy was decreed 
he was elected, for the first time. President of the Con- 
vention.^ It was with him in the chair that the news 
of the capitulation of Marseilles was heard, that the 
petition of Bordeaux for mercy was accorded, that 
Normandy admitted the failure of her revolt. But it 
was also during his presidency that worse news came: 
that Toulon admitted the English fleet,^ and that the 
strength of the resistance of Lyons was endangering the 
Republic. 

He yielded. The Herbertists demanded, and re- 
demanded the blood of the Girondists;^ he permitted 
their trial to proceed. With the entry of the wildest ideas 

^ August 23. He was also at the time President of the Jacobins. 
3 28th of August. 

* I have no space to quote them. Let those who wish to follow the fury 
read the 24th number ol: the Fdre Duchesne. 



I 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 263 

into the State at bay and in the delirium of a close 
siege, with the proclamation of the republican calendar 
and the beginning of the six months' struggle with 
Christianity the Terror became real, weighed on all 
France, and began the useless marvel of blood that 
ended with Thermidor. 

It does not concern this book to describe the end of 
those great men whose fall was also the first heavy 
wound of the Republic. 

What is to be said of the man whom legend has 
made responsible for their blood and for that of so many 
others ? Certainly he did not cause it to flow ; almost 
as certainly he could have checked the disaster. But he 
was absorbed and contained by the fear of something 
general, the fear of the corporate power of Paris, or, as 
he called it, the People, from which his reputation pro- 
ceeded, and of whose lips he had become the servant. 

It was (like all his appreciations of things general 
and living) an error. It was not the people that de- 
manded the blood of the Girondins : it was a small, in- 
tense and violent faction that had the name of the 
people always upon its lips, that passed for the people 
because it was in the tradition of the popular vengeance 
and of the great mob violence of the past years. He 
did not oppose. He excused in platitudes, and that is 
all that can be said of his position towards the Gironde 
in its last hour. 

Save this : that at the moment when the Terror was 
turning from a political method to a fanaticism he 
developed — it is a thing his closer students might think 
incredible in the light of his past — yet he did develop a 
kind of firmness utterly different from his mere tenacity. 
He had always been direct ; for two years, since the be- 
ginning of a quarrel with the Gironde, he had been acid ; 
but now, whatever it was in him that had produced 
directness, and latterly a sympathy of expression, was 



264 ROBESPIERRE 

lifted to the power of assault, and a personal managing 
of things. He desired, with a vague prevision of '94, to 
show that he could kill or save. 

There are two occasions within ten days of each other 
which very well illustrate this change : the great de- 
bate of the 25 th September, and his action upon the 3rd 
October. 

In the first the effect of new victories was weighing 
upon the Assembly, and when Briez appeared before it, 
excusing the fall of Valenciennes, the Parliament had 
acquired a certain hardness of temper which Robespierre 
reflected. Briez said plainly, " I did my best ; I saw 
death from quite near by, and at least I preserved for 
the nation an important garrison." There were many 
answers to the pathetic apology, one only was stiffened 
into epigram, and that was Robespierre's : " Are you 
dead ? " He had been in Valenciennes ; the town had 
surrendered ; he came back alive. 

A slight illness that had affected Robespierre a week 
before, returned after the effort of that debate, and he 
did not reappear till the day when there was question 
of killing the Gironde, yet on this second occasion also 
he showed a certain strength and mastery. 

The benches were half empty ; Amar,^ rising to read 
his report against the Gironde, spoke to a house of which 
he knew well that the majority even among its di- 
minished numbers desired to be absent. He asked 
them to vote that the doors should be closed, and that no 
one should leave the house till a decision had been 
taken ; then he read out in sentences that swept like a 
scythe the condemnation of the whole party of the 
moderates. A movement began (it originated from a 
private member) for sending before the revolutionary 

^ Amar has so little to do with this book that I fear his extraordinary 
personality has been neglected in it. He will reappear in Thermidor, 
Let this anecdote suffice. He chose the month before the abolition of all 
titles of nobility to purchase one at a considerable expense. 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 265 

tribunal not only the twenty-two of the Gironde, but the 
seventy-three who had in June signed a protest against 
their exclusion. That motion was of a kind which, in 
the height of the Terror, it was almost impossible to 
resist ; from what motive it was that Robespierre alone 
resisted it, it would be difficult to say. It may have 
been the tortuous sense of justice which never deserted 
him ; it may have been a panic lest the Convention should 
wholly destroy itself in these passions and leave the 
Republic empty; but I would be more inclined to be- 
lieve that it was a new determination to bo daring. He 
wished to try himself in power, to ride the Assembly, to 
set himself as a firm obstacle against " the madmen," to 
begin leading for once rather than be led by Paris, and 
in general, to have the inner satisfaction that he had 
come to a place where he (that had always imposed his 
principles) could at last impose also his decisions upon 
the details of policy. 

Just as the Convention was abandoning itself to one 
of those unhappy floods in which lassitude mixed with 
partisanship could drive them into the worst of their 
excesses and abandonments, just as a fatal division would 
have been taken, Robespierre spoke. 

The deputies were already streaming to the bar 
to vote that the division should be taken on the roll- 
call of the names, and that the friends of the Gironde, 
if any remained, should be marked in such a manner. 

He rose and refused to support Billaud Varenne in 
his motion for that roll-call ; a motion that underlined 
the Terror, and that would have left each man to stand 
for ever before history as the judge or the accomplice 
of the Gironde. He said : — 

" I do not see the necessity of regarding the national 
Convention as divided into two classes — that which is the 
friend of the people, and that which is made up of 
conspirators and traitors. We have no right to decide 



266 ROBESPIERRE 

suddenly that we have to deal with any other con- 
spirators than those that are named in the report. Let 
us take the original decree upon its merits, and vote 
purely and simply upon that." 

And he made a second and much more important 
interruption in the debate. It was proposed to include 
with the Gironde in the same decree of accusation the 
seventy- three who had protested against the 2nd of June. 
He opposed. " I speak in the face of the people, and 
speak frankly. I will be judged only by my conscience. 
You must, even at this hour, distinguish between opinions 
and acts." The Herbertists and the Left began to mur- 
mur. He continued : " Citizens, be sure of this. You 
have no ultimate defenders save those who dare to 
speak in the moments when something seems to im- 
pose silence." 

He went on, speaking of "the faction," trailing out 
a peroration, but he had saved the Right from a general 
execution. 

In this moment which, though the violent men 
that drove the storm could not know it, was the doom 
of their effort, a spirit that was not wholly human 
disturbed the nights with tragedy; the Terror boiled, 
and men approached the limits where despair and vision 
meet. It was the last clutch of the great wrestling, 
the moment of tottering before the throw. The mind of 
Paris lost hold of the ground ; Dalua, the oldest of the 
gods, the spirit of Celtic madness, took a part in this 
strain of the western fortunes, vengeance and darkness 
entered in with him also. Twisted into the same 
whirlwind, all the heroisms and the first victories 
appeared. 

The empty head of Orleans fell ; but that same day 
Dubois Crance broke into Lyons at the tail of an artillery 



THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE 267 

duel, and spared the place like a soldier : ^ a whole army 
was set free for the frontiers. 

A week later a kind of Sabbat led the Queen, very 
haggard and proud, to the guillotine ;2 but Cholet was pre- 
paring — Cholet, the great fight in which the Republic 
fought and fought, not noticing the hours, till at last it 
broke the Vendeans. 

In the hour that the Queen died Wattignies was won. 
All the day before, the centre had charged uselessly 
against the Austrian cannon, the right had been broken 
by the Hungarian cavalry and had lost its guns. The day 
seemed so lost to the Republic that Coburg did not call 
upon the Duke of York and the English for reinforce- 
ment ; but on the morrow, the 1 6th of October, a mist 
that a lyric has called the " Destiny of France " came 
down upon the plain, Carnot, tall and hard, dragged 
off the young recruits to the right, appeared on the 
plateau and, when the fog lifted at midday, took the 
last earthworks at the bayonet, himself leading, losing 
half his men, and opening the blockade of the frontier. 
Then he put off the uniform in which he had raised 
the blood of the boys behind him, and posted home 
sombrely to Paris in his long grey civilian coat, to tell 
the Convention coldly that the new order was saved, but 
to make no mention of his charge. All the week was 
breathless. Naples to her ruin declared war, the last of 
the coalition. The non-juring priests were outlawed. 

It was in the agony and bewilderment of such success 
following upon such a crisis (Paris had lain awake to 
hear the issue of the struggle) that the Gironde went to 

^ He found his own cousin there, commanding the rebels, and per- 
mitted a number of evasions. Kead in this connection the vivid memoirs 
of Mile. d'Ercherolles, which have recently been very well translated into 
English, there you will hear of how this mousquetaire shaved in a great 
silver bowl, chosen out of the loot, and laughed, and granted largess. 

^ By far the best impression of her is David's thumb-nail sketch, taken 
as she went by in the cart. 



268 ROBESPIERRE 

the guillotine; and opened the way downwards for all 
the revolutionaries. They at the approach of death 
were possessed with a spirit of feasting and a call from 
the sunlight came up northward to them and glorified 
their end. 

It was already the time of the vintage. The vine- 
yards by the great river and on the hills that bound it 
like low walls were full of men and made a moving 
tapestry under the mild pleasure of their autumn. At 
this season a secret working runs through all wine, and 
something that is more generous than content gives 
praises for the summer past and rests from creation with 
the silent plenitude of energy. The vine prepares life, 
and supports it against the season of darkness and cold. 
This link of the summer ended and the mists beginning, a 
viaticum for winter, was for these men in Paris a viaticum 
before the long time death. These clear souls, chained 
in the north, received the influence, and the passing of 
the Gironde was ennobled by the dignity and certitude 
that accompany enthusiastic calm. It was as though 
the rainy gloom of those last days in Paris had been lit 
from somewhere by the soft sky of October where it 
protects the garden of the Pyrenees. 

On the last day of the month they sang their song 
together, and Vergniaud that had best loved freedom 
died the last, still inspired by grave music. So the 
Republic narrowed, but whatever narrows, rages upon 
itself, and ends. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 

What is it in tlie story of this man's soul that turns the 
eye inward and forbids the appreciation of realities ? It 
is as though in the mere writing of him some subtle 
sympathy proceeded from a spirit so long silent and drew 
one into its own void and vagueness, where his one 
stuff, his firm and isolated conviction, hung rare and 
alone. 

Time and again it has seemed in the nature of this 
book to call up the armies, or at least to fill its pages 
with the creative noise of Paris ; time and again the 
persistent monotone that enspelled the tribune of the 
Jacobins has cut off as with a curtain the outer sound of 
the Kevolution from my mind. His innumerable chosen 
phrases, his reams of blue paper, close- written and erased, 
have been fine threads cramping my hand, and I have 
lost the description of an experiment so vast and terrible 
that a pen recording it should properly turn without 
effort to reproduce its majesty. But Robespierre preach- 
ing Robespierre, the one political right insisting for ever 
on the one political right, has cast over the sublime 
accidents of those four years a curious and unnatural 
hush, and has dominated all the colours with a screen 
of something colourless. So divers cannot hear the waves 
for the singing in their ears. 

The period of which I am about to treat in this 
chapter emphasises more than all that went before it the. 
strange contrast between Robespierre's life within and the 

outer clamour that frames him. I am about to treat of 

369 



270 ROBESPIERRE 

tlie crisis and agony of tlie Revolution ; of the five months 
that open with the execution of the Queen and close with 
that of Danton ; of the passage from the sunlight to the 
sunlight, from the last leaves to the spring again, in which 
darkness the Revolution ran out beyond itself and in- 
sisted upon a path that could only lead to the abyss — ^yet 
in that wild drive Robespierre's whole history is con- 
cerned with an interior thing, and, writing of it, I am 
confined to but one intense episode of morals ; a vivid 
sin, remote from which, uncertain and ill-defined, pass 
shadows, faint echoes, phantasms of action. The angry 
victories at the Bayonet, the strange new months and 
days, the great persecution of the Church, the aggrava- 
tion of the Terror, the giant's wrestle with rebellion, the 
frenzy of the reprisals, the silent despotism of the Com- 
mittee — of itself a full subject for a book — all these must 
go by almost unheeded that there may be told in a few 
pages what passed in an empty space of thought. And 
this glaring and teeming passage of our immediate past 
must be abandoned for the single crisis of one solitary 
mind. 

Of what nature was that crisis ? It was the tran- 
sition of Robespierre from the self-deception and gradual 
ambition which had risen in him throughout the past 
two years to the definite acceptation of the new position 
which he was to hold for so brief a time in '94. He who 
had never governed one individual, at last attempted to 
govern, or rather to pass as the chief power in, the nation. 

Was that determination fully conscious ? Yes ; with 
this qualification, that it was intimately mixed up with 
that illusion by which all of us read our own person- 
alities into our conception of abstract right. He would 
have told you that he wished, as a tribune rather than 
as a leader, to make a right world, but in practice that 
wish became a necessity to rule. 

Now ruling and the power of one man were opposed 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 271 

to all that had made him : to the sublime theory of 
which he had been so jejune, but so sincere, persistent, 
and faithful an exponent. Therefore, when he passed the 
boundary that lay between his old complaints, suspicions, 
and love of praise, and his new plan of supremacy, he 
abandoned his very self. That abandonment was to force 
him to two great disasters or crimes. First, he hesitated 
— till it was too late — to join those who had risen with 
Danton to stop the Terror ; secondly, he was compelled, 
as a consequence of this political intrigue, to give up 
Danton to the political necessities of the Committee. 
Essentially a man innocent, or incapable, of intrigue, 
this last betrayal should have seemed a crime to him ; 
essentially a man of few and clear principles, and abhor- 
ring arbitrary power, his temporising with the Terror 
(which was in its nature martial law) was a direct nega- 
tion of his own theory of political justice. It is the 
method and consequence of his double fall that I have 
to develop in what follows. 

The Girondins were dead. 

The scene upon which the Eepublic entered when it 
had sealed its mysteries with such a sacrifice was one 
whose motive and prime force was the unnecessary con- 
tinuance of a state of siege in spite of, and on into the 
beginnings of military success : it was the momentum of 
the Terror. But the Terror, thus continued, grew pro- 
digiously, and it is this charge beyond which lends to 
the awful passage of that winter its dissociation from 
human experience, its dark experiments, its furious asso- 
lutions. Here men broke apart from their closest political 
bonds, from the sense of things, and from themselves. 
It lay with Robespierre's own decision to follow or to 
resist the swirl. Had he joined the moderates, as they 
themselves believed he would join them, the Republic 
would have endured. 



272 ROBESPIERRE 

It is a truth not easily appreciated, yet one which 
determines all the end of his life, and which I therefore 
would set forth fully, that he accepted at this moment, 
by I know not what miscalculation of social forces, 
the side that could not endure, and abandoned the re- 
action toward simplicity and normal law which should 
have been the special function of his rule. At the head 
of the Convention and the club, passing for the master 
of the Committee, the primary weakness in. him appeared 
as it had never appeared during all the years of oppo- 
sition and criticism. He did not know how men were 
governed, nor had he ever understood what are the cor- 
rectives to violence ; he accepted all that the real powers 
(Carnot, Prieur, the lower committee, certain representa- 
tives on mission) might demand, so only he could stUl 
think himself an infallible head of the democracy. 

I know that he may be taken as yielding only to an 
irresistible thing: there is an atmosphere of excess in '93 
that seems to overwhelm and excuse the revolutionaries. 
How many men chiefly responsible for that time lived 
on into the Restoration, silent, respected, even provincial ; 
how many protest with justice in their memoirs that even 
the worst of the Terror was a thing driven by necessity. 

Look over France and you see nothing but a cavalry 
charge in which time is eaten up by fury, as a field 
passes like a river and is eaten up under the hoofs of 
straining horses. The 2nd of June is already very old, 
the Monarchy (a year dead, not a year buried) is for- 
gotten — or only remembered for chance vengeance — it 
is so passed that these executions, the Queen, Bailly, 
the Dubarry, each utterly separate from the other, mark 
out sporadically (the first diplomatic, the second a popular 
revenge, the third a show), the last shots of the Crown's 
pursuers. The monarchy is so utterly passed that it 
has become an incomprehensible legend. Its true quality 
is already so forgotten that republicans accusing one 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 273 

another drag up the charge of " royahsm " like a mean- 
ingless epithet, a conventional abuse. France driving at 
the most extreme realisation of the Revolution, cutting 
off her past, living and dead together, accepting a new- 
calendar of Reason, forgetting in her tempest religion 
and the link of history, and even the divisions of time, 
seems something upon which we cannot reason : a storm 
or a wild music. Seen as a drifting thing on such a tide 
you may make of Robespierre in the autumn of '93 a 
toy of forces so superior to himself that the analysis of 
his motives becomes indifferent. But from within his 
own soul things had another aspect. 

Look at the centre of that mind and you will perceive 
one dominant act : a great refusal ; the self-desertion that 
broke its self-reliance, the last compromise between his 
ambition and his faith. This abandonment crumbled 
the small central pillar upon which, had he but known 
it, all his power reposed. It was as a man of debate, 
wary, minute — but especially definite and inflexible — 
that his rise had been permitted. That epithet of " in- 
corruptible," in which plutocratic societies and their 
historians can now find nothing but the comic, had in it 
at that time something of the sublime. In the quiet 
times of decadence, in the times of the merchants and 
the years that prepare defeats and shame, it is something 
to remain unmoved by the opportunities of wealth : in 
the times of crisis and of revolution it touches upon 
the heroic to maintain with a ceaseless activity, how- 
ever monotonous, the road to an exact and certain 
goal. 

I have spoken of the first breach which was made 
in that wall of his; his alliance with Paris. A year 
before, in the autumn of '92, he had accepted Paris, and 
in accepting the spokesmanship of that city he had fallen 
from his first position, he had ceased to be the single 
exponent of the creed. But that initial corruption which 

s 



274 ROBESPIERRE 

he suffered just after the fall of the monarchy was not 
final, nor was it irretrievable ; it was a first but not a 
complete abandonment of '89. I have said that it was 
in part the product of ambition, but it was not yet wholly 
that, and Robespierre bitterly defending himself against 
the Gironde could always plead honestly that he remem- 
bered the Gironde reactionary, based upon a limited 
suffrage, mixed up through Brissot with intrigue, perhaps 
(he was sincere in thinking it) with the Court, certainly 
with the shifty politics of Dumouriez. He could plead 
before the tribunal of his own conscience that France 
until the death of the King was in two camps, and that 
a man did service only by joining a party discipline. He 
could plead that he was senior member for Paris, and 
that Paris alone had the light, that the provinces were 
largely led by reaction and did not know the peril in 
which the future of the Revolution stood. 

When the King's head had fallen, and when the execu- 
tive broke down in the hands of visionaries he could 
still hold himself in the main consistent, and if he 
demanded the dismissal of the moderates he could say, 
" In theory I still hold for the pure Republic. When peace 
is restored I will maintain the sanctity of the national 
representation — but the times are not normal; unless 
something is done we shall have the enemy in the 
capital with the summer." This kind of defence had 
now broken down. 

A crime is the matter of a moment, but the self- 
deception that often leads up to crime is a process. 
That process I have shown him suffering in the summer 
of '93. He had been, as it were, compelled to accept 
the great opportunity of the 2nd of June, he had been 
called to power. He had not been unwilling. The two 
friends, St. Just and Couthon, had held open for him 
the doors of the Committee and had mounted guard 
for him in the Hall of the Two Pillars. By a kind of 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 275 

gravitation lie had passed the door and had entered the 
Committee at the close of July. 

He had obtained an increasing jurisdiction at the ex- 
pense of an increasing trouble of the mind. He knew that 
he was becoming something mixed, somewhat larger, but 
much lower than, the little Kobespierre that had been 
an anchor to the Revolution for four years. Men odious 
to him, the Herbertists, the men of dirt and of mere 
passion, had pressed upon France all August, and he 
had submitted — in order that there should be no rift 
in the unanimity that supported him. The blood and 
the clamour for blood that in the drowsy heats had 
sickened and broken down the great nature of Danton^ 
had been endured by this less generous and drier 
mind. 

But he had been troubled. He had saved the 
seventy-three. He had not rejoiced but had rather 
drawn back into himself at the death of Vergniaud and 
his companions. Still he did not move for fear that, 
moving, he should lose his place. He gave up all 
initiative, save those spasmodic movements of which the 
most famous is the 3rd of October, because initiative and 
originality endanger a spokesman. There is no doubt 
that ambition began to possess him altogether, and that 
he had subjected and harnessed to his ambition all the 
strict logic that was his only principle of vitality. Even 
the great news of Wattignies that had been for the 
nation a song of deliverance, turned in him to a political 
opportunity, a lucky chance permitting him to affirm 
himself and to escape the risk of " moderatism " that he 
had run in the month before. 

He hardened. But the soul of a man, however 
adust, has still something of the organic, and when the 
organic turns rigid it is dying ; it grows brittle and can 
be broken to pieces. 

This is why I have called his entry into the winter 



276 ROBESPIERRE 

and his policy during those five months to the spring — 
Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivose, Pluviose, Ventose and on 
into Germinal — his temptation. There was still con- 
stantly open to him the road to return. He would by 
an alliance with Danton have been able at one moment 
to stop the Terror and to let France slip back into the 
normal. Paris was certainly ready, the provinces would 
have followed. But he saw his nominal supremacy 
endangered, he felt near him like guards the Committee, 
able to expose him at any moment and to show that 
they were the true master. He feared for his reputation 
of authority, and he did not dare. By yielding to that 
direct temptation, by choosing something against his per- 
manent self, he was led on to '94, and, in spite of his 
recent protests in the Committee he became the outer 
title of the Committee's policy. He was led on to the 
sacrifice of Danton, of Desmoulins his friend, of poor 
Lucille, the wife of Desmoulins ; Lucille, whose letter he 
was compelled to treat as a proof of conspiracy, the 
hostess of so many evenings. 

As nearly as such strict minds can, he approached 
hypocrisy ; and since things good and evil carry in 
themselves salvation and damnation, this great refusal 
fell back upon him to his hurt. He that had been the 
symbol of the Revolution found himself the symbol of 
a rigour that grew from pitilessness to fury ; it did 
him no service to attack it silently from within ; out- 
wardly he was still the later, useless Terror, and as 
the later, useless Terror he fell ; finding that whoever 
permits is an author ; that God demands confession open 
and full recantations. 

This is the tragedy which I have to follow to the 
close of this book. It is not only a private tragedy ; 
it is the catastrophe of the Revolution, because the man 
who suffered it was not only a man, but also such 
a symbol of equality that, for all his paucity of in- 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 277 

vention and action, no republican can utterly deny him 
the title of great. V^v^.~ C» a •• ■:, 1. V-v,.>Vvv-vvi:t..* -o.^ 

When the Girondins suffered, the shock of the axe 
trembled through France ; it was felt at Arcis and 
aroused Danton. Danton returned. But there is 
something in these puissant natures which lends itself 
not only to the creative activities, but also to the after 
effects, of fever. Men who have ridden in a regiment 
know what it is after nights of bivouac by low rivers in 
the autumn meadows to find the reins trembling in their 
hands when they mount before morning, to lose grip 
with their knees and to fear disasters. They take an 
obstacle uneasily, and they blunder in their orders. 
Some such accident of nerve had fallen upon the Cham- 
penois. He came back, still a giant, still forcing a loud 
note, but within uncertain, losing opportunities and 
coming too late and too gradually into the advance. He 
was determined to stop the Terror, but the action of his 
determination grew and formed itself slowly — had his 
nature permitted it he might have sounded a charge that 
would have dragged Robespierre in with the mel^e of the 
moderates, have persuaded him (who saw nothing largely) 
that general power was on this new side. 

In capturing Robespierre Danton would have caught 
in with him the whole movement and force of which 
Robespierre was the accredited chief. The Jacobins 
would have been divided, the Committee would have 
split, its majority would have appealed to the Conven- 
tion. The Commune certainly would have risen or 
attempted to rise in defence of the guillotine, but Danton 
and his policy would have won. For certainly the 
majority of the committee would not have dared to call 
up a battalion, and certainly Paris, the sections, the guns, 
would not have followed the Commune or Herbert.-^ The 

^ This statement needs no such proof as could be drawn from research. 
The enormous sale of the Vieux Cordelier when that pamphlet was issued 



278 ROBESPIERRE 

moral authority of the Convention, mutilated and silent 
as it was, yet was the one thing which stood. To the 
Convention everything was referred, and by it alone, 
legally, would anything be ratified. It would have been 
galvanised into life by such a return of the national 
vigour as Danton — the Danton of '92 — might at once 
have inspired and expressed. 

Had Danton struck at once on his return, this tide 
would, I say, have set so strongly as to drag Robespierre 
in with it, the Terror would have ceased before January. 
As it was, Danton waited a month, and Robespierre had 
time to hesitate and to fall into his false role. 

The execution of the Girondins fell on the 3 i st of 
October ; Madame Roland had been guillotined on the 
8th of November; on the loth her husband had stabbed 
himself by the roadside in Normandy. Danton did not 
come back till the i8th of November; his first speech 
in the Convention^ was not heard till the 2 6th,^ and it 
did not deal with the Terror. 

Desmoulins, whom Danton had sent out to do the 
work, but who was also half the inspiration of it, did 
not put his pen to the famous pamphlets that shook the 
system of the Terror till the 3rd of December, and this, 
the first number of the Vieux Cordelier, did not appear 
till the 5 th. By that time for six weeks the Committee 
had been preparing, had pressed round Robespierre who 
sat in its midst : had made him feel that the full powers 
of the Dictatorship were still necessary to them. But 
the Committee were not yet enemies of his. The 
Committee did not plot or plan such a pressure ; it was 
an inevitable result of the nature of their organisation. 

More than this, he had seen St. Just, his right 
hand, plunge fully into the policy of coercion — St. 

with the object of stopping the Terror and the difficulty which the great 
Committee (in a country tiained to centralised government) found in 
suppressing the movement are alone ample evidence. 
^ Moniteur, 8th Frimaire. 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 279 

Just, become by an accident partly a worker, knowing 
the armies, a drafter of reports, would not have followed 
the return to clemency; Robespierre would have been 
alone with Couthon. 

Nevertheless, in spite of all these reasons for hesita- 
tion, his continued balance between the policy of pity 
and that of the Committee's despotism, his ultimate 
decision, and his abandonment of the Dantonists, afford 
an abundant material for the study of the man. 

Danton returned at the moment when Robespierre 
was supporting the only part of the moderate programme 
in which he felt that his leadership would retain com- 
plete security, and that part, moreover, of which he had 
become, by his consistent action through four years, a 
kind of protector : he was defending the Church. 

Brumaire — all early November — had been a riot of 
Herbertism. It was suited to the breakdown of all 
reality that the Commune should imagine that the roots 
of Catholicism had withered. Chaumette, Clootz, Mor- 
moro the printer, from his cave in the Rue de la Harpe, 
passed up and down the city like raving missionaries 
" unpriesting." They pruned the old tree. It was at 
this moment that the nullity of the schismatic church 
appeared, and that, with a sincerity which perhaps saved 
their souls, such priests as had clung for livelihood or by 
routine to a faith they had never held, came in con- 
fessing an emptiness of the mind. Gobel was easily 
persuaded. He resigned his bishopric, and came into the 
Convention, with half his clergy and all the Commune 
at his back, to renounce his orders. The movement, 
passing very rapidly, and falling in three months into 
nothingness, ran throughout the new dioceses. 

Of all the instances take these two. Parens, the 
vicar of Boississe le Bertrand, near Melun, wrote to the 
Convention on November 7 (17th Brumaire) a letter: 
" Here are my papers. I am, or have been, a priest — 



^80 ROBESPIERRE 

that is to say, a charlatan." Also, lie asked for a small 
pension. " Because," said the Rabelaisian, " a man who 
can only chant oremus has no way of earning his liveli- 
hood" {Moniteur, 17th Brumaire). Again, the yet more 
thorough ecclesiastic who suddenly appeared before a 
session of the Commune, abjured and begged that " in 
the roll of citizens they would change his name from 
that of Erasmus, which it had hitherto been, to that of 
Apostate." 

The sacred vessels were brought before the Parlia- 
ment in mascarades, there was pillage in more than one 
church, the saturnalia reappeared. The vestments, I 
believe, of Dubois found a fitting place upon the back 
of an ass, and his mitre was put on the beast's head — a 
last expiation of the regency. On the 20th Brumaire^ 
was held in Notre Dame the feast that may or may not 
have been called that of the Goddess of Reason. The 
Commune, with very partial success, ordered the church 
doors throughout the city to be closed. Ten days later, 
on the 1st of Frimaire, Herbert, in the Jacobins, de- 
manded the last extremities — the execution of the 
seventy-three, the sacrifice of Madame Elizabeth. " The 
extermination of the Capets." It was plain that the 
wave which had risen up against all religion was drag- 
ging anarchy in its wake. 

This crisis affords the first landmark in the rapid pro- 
gress of Robespierre towards the reputation of supreme 
power. He caught Herbertism just at the top flight of 
its extravagance, and stood out as the Arrester, the 
moderator of the Revolution. That the great Committee 
was the true author of Herbert's fall there can be no 
doubt. They had determined on the Terror as a prac- 
tical instrument, a military necessity, they would not let 
it turn into a weapon for the extremists, nor let its 
authority slip from their hands into that of Herbert and 
^ loth November. 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 281 

his friends. Yet, though the committee determined the 
breaking of Herbert, the opportunity was singularly fitted 
to make Robespierre appear as though he was acting 
alone. The whole matter was bound up with religion, 
and religion had been Robespierre's department, as it 
were, for two years. Herbertism was inspired by a 
hatred of Christianity; Robespierre, by that faint in- 
heritance of it which had produced the Vicaire Savoyard. 
For more than a year he had been the only hope of 
that great body of citizens who hesitated, troubled, be- 
tween their new republicanism and their memories of 
the Church. Up to the close of his life he was destined 
to express, and to depend upon, his benevolent neutrality 
towards Catholicism. 

His speech on this occasion, which began the destruc- 
tion of one party of his rivals, is often quoted to show 
the texture of his mind. It is from beginning to end a 
defence, as nearly passionate as his manner permitted, 
of the idea of God; the last rhetoric of the Deism of 
Rousseau. He exclaimed in one of those clear insights 
from which his pedantry did not wholly debar him : — 

" Atheism is of its nature oligarchic . . . when the 
conception of God comes to be attacked, the attack will 
not proceed from the popular instinct, but from the rich 
and the privileged." 

It was a prophecy of our own time. 

The attack on religion, which had been the triumph 
of the Commune of '93, marked also the highest point 
of its power ; it had aroused in those who had hitherto 
remained indifferent a prodigious hostility, it had pre- 
pared reaction. And the Committee — that is, the 
workers of the Committee, the majority — grew afraid. 

The Committee determined to attack Herbert and 
the old commune not as extremists, but as undisciplined 
men, and as men likely to provoke by their madness a 
return to milder things. They feared reaction. 

For Carnot, a reaction at this moment meant the 



282 ROBESPIERRE 

stoppage of the convoys, the lack of munitions, the 
failure of recruits ; he needed the Terror. For Couthon 
(not in the committee but, as it were, a department of 
the government in himself — Finance) it meant the dis- 
appearance of the currency, the total collapse of the 
depreciated assignats, the bankruptcy of the nation in 
the midst of the wars ; he needed the Terror. Jean-Bon 
St. Andr^ needed it to man his ships and to provision 
and to build them ; St. Just to drive his armies ; Prieur 
to enforce his plans. This need for the Terror was not 
yet actively expressed, but the committee were watching 
for the first cries against severity, and Robespierre, who 
hesitated and desired clemency, who in standing an 
obstacle to the Herbertian faction and in defending 
religion had seemed to prepare the return to pity — 
Robespierre sat among his colleagues and knew how little 
of a master he was in that room. He felt their eyes 
on him and he did not go where he would. 

Then came a few hard winter weeks, during which 
the Committee organised their plan against Herbert and 
the Commune of Paris. Robespierre knew that in 
surrounding this insurrectionary they had no thought 
of checking the Terror. He admitted their mastery and 
was willing to continue the Terror. 

The lively art of Desmoulins, the sense of Danton 
had not divined this. Both these men, the greater and 
the lesser, were determined to arrest the persecution and 
to relieve the State. It was time. The opposition to 
Herbert which Robespierre had so conspicuously led 
encouraged them. They believed themselves to have 
some favour with the Committee. They thought 
themselves certain of Maximilian. It is to this day a 
matter of doubt whether he did not himself inspire the 
first of Desmoulins pamphlets.^ It was on the 15th 
Frimaire, the 5 th of December, that the first number of 

^ He admits having seeu the proof -sheetSj and we may presume that 
he actually corrected them. 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 283 

the Vieux Cordelier appeared ; on the i oth the second, 
on the 15 th the more famous third. Desmoulins 
hammered into what he believed to be the rifted stuff 
of the Terror the phrases of Tacitus Hke wedges. It 
was not only the terrible irony of his pen nor the 
climax of his genius spurred on to its highest just on 
the edge of his doom ; it was also the return of humanity 
that lent his efforts so much power. 

Desenne's shop became the centre of whatever was 
read and debated. The Vieux Cordelier was caught up 
from the presses by crowds that filled the streets, it 
passed by thousands into all hands ; became a common 
cry throughout the capital. 

"Women ran through the hall of the Convention 
demanding the liberation of their sons, and Camille's 
whole programme seemed to have gained the city : a 
" Committee of Clemency " was demanded. Everything 
prepared the reaction : all that Christmas was a noel of 
victories. It was known in one week that the Republic 
was saved ; in one week between Christmas Eve and the 
New Year Paris heard of the Vendeans crushed at 
Savenay, of the forcing of the lines of Wissembourg, of 
Landau relieved, of the enemy passing back home over 
the Rhine, 

Desmoulins in the first four numbers of his pamphlet 
had taken for granted that Robespierre would defend the 
same cause. On the 7 th of January, however, some- 
thing had passed in the Committee. What it was will 
never be known, but Robespierre appearing at the 
Jacobins disclaimed the cause of pity. All his new power 
compelled him to the retractation ; he remembered how 
the generals turned to him,i behind the back of the 

^ There is to be seen at the archives a curious little pocket-book, in 
the first seventeen pages of which Robespierre has made his private notes 
on policy. Among these one may find that he had down the names of the 
generals, his proposal for their disposition, and his judgment upon their 



284 ROBESPIERRE 

Committee ; how it was to him that the smallest private 
appeals were directed. 

Let me retrace the last steps that led Robespierre to 
this desertion. 

Just upon Christmas he had promised a " Committee 
of Justice " which might have been made — and which he 
probably intended to make — into a court of revision for 
the gradual liberation of the prisoners. Camille had 
written the fourth number of the Vieux Cordelier as an 
appeal by name to Robespierre. 

" My Robespierre, I call you here by your name, for 
I remember the moment when Pitt had you alone left 
to withstand his coalition, and when but for you the 
ship would have perished: the Republic was passing 
into chaos. . . . Oh ! my old college friend, remember 
that there is something more durable in love than in 
this fear, and clemency (Tertullian tells it us) is like 
a ladder of falsehoods, but reaches to heaven. You came 
very close to that idea when you spoke of a Committee 
of Justice . . . but why should the word 'Pity' have 
become a crime in the Republic ? " 

On that same day, the 2 1 st of December,^ at the 
Jacobins Nicholas the public printer had cried out to 
Camille, " Camille, you seem very close to the guillotine," ^ 
and Camille had answered gaily, " Nicholas, you seem 

appeals, as though he were himself concerned with the department of 
war. Here are his judgments on the generals Dumas, Marceau, Hoche. 
And it was his brother who had just found out the genius of Bonaparte 
at Toulon. 

^ And on the same day (the coincidence is grotesque enough to merit 
a record) the Convention after a long and stormy debate decided that the 
habit of speaking with the hat on was disrespectful. " It has grown too 
common of late," said Robespierre, and when there was cited the example 
of the Quakers he replied with some justice, "Quakers are usually ex- 
ceptions that prove a rule." 

* There is a discussion whether Robespierre put up Nicholas to warn 
Camille. There is no proof but a tradition to that efEect. Nicholas was 
indeed Robespierre's man, but on the other hand Robespierre would 
never have put the thing so bluntly. 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 285 

very close to making a fortune. It is but a year since 
that you made your dinner off a baked apple, and here 
you are printer to the State." It was the first pass of 
tbe duel that opened between the indulgents and the 
extremists, a duel in wbicli, by the spring, each had 
perished, leaving the Committee supreme. 

On the 7th of January, then, the i8th Nivose, the 
growing irritation against Camille broke out openly in 
the club. The opportunity coincided with Robespierre's 
recantation. It was known that the silent royalist 
faction which lay under the city, a minority ready to 
strike, had raised its head at the appearance of the Vieicx 
Cordelier. Apart from the Herbertist group that 
Desmoulins aimed at, apart from the men whom he 
called by name and cut and wounded with his style, 
the common republicans fell into an ill-ease and were 
alarmed. Robespierre had determined to follow the 
Committee, but he remembered his friend. He 
attempted compromise. Desmoulins was not in the 
mood for it ; he could see that Robespierre was tempted 
to abandon him, but he thought he had enough hold to 
prevent it. Some days before he had offered to burn 
his No. 3 — he had offered it in a rhetorical manner. 

" You complain of the third Number ? I can under- 
stand it : I have given orders that it shall not be 
reprinted. I will even burn it publicly, so that you 
promise to read my No. 5." 

This Robespierre took up at the Jacobins, and seeing 
Desmoulins in front of him, looking him straight in the 
eyes and with the slight perpetual smile upon his lips, 
he excused him ; apologised for him to the club. 

" There is no need to expel Camille. We will burn 
his pamphlet." 

Robespierre, a man incapable of repartee, had laid 
open his guard, and Camille could not resist the advan- 
tage. He laughed out after his opening stutter. 



2 86 ROBESPIERRE 

" Burning is not a convincing reply." 

It was Rousseau's own answer to tlie public burning of 
his "Emile." Robespierre, whose whole life it was to 
play the part of Rousseau in power, heard, as it were, his 
own self laughing at him in Desmoulins' reply. His 
smile left him, and he abandoned the last thread of 
the alliance with the indulgents. 

The Terror began to surround Desmoulins. The 
final withdrawal of Robespierre left him to the warnings 
of anxious friends. Once, in his house at evening, they 
hesitated at his courage and begged him to retire a little 
that audacious skirmishing line of pamphlets. Lucille, 
gracious, unrestrained, and wayward, put her hand upon 
an objectors mouth and said, "Let him save the 
country in his own way. Whoever dissuades him shall 
have none of my chocolate." They had something in 
them both of children. Fate took them in the spring, 
and they died within a very few days one of the other ; 
the lives also of both these lovers accused Robespierre 
when he came to die. 

I have held throughout this book that Robespierre was 
never really master; nevertheless, it must be admitted 
that in this moment of January, after the 12th, when 
he had broken with Desmoulins, when Billaud-Varennes 
had publicly threatened Danton in the Convention,^ when 
St. Just, summoned back from the armies, had reinforced 
him with a supreme energy, Robespierre might have 
thought himself a master ; the pressure of the committee 
upon him was underground ; it was easy to persuade 
himself. 

I might waste pages in the analysis of that tortuous 
process whereby a man convinces his own mind till it 
adopts an attitude beyond its powers. It is enough for 
me to describe him as one now permitted to speak for 

1 "Woe to the man that defends Fabre d'Eglantine 1 " 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 287 

the government, one that kept that position only by a 
constant attention to every gust that blew from the 
right or the left, one whom all consulted, implored or 
execrated as thouarh he had been the true author of the 
Terror, and one who consented to be so flattered and to 
pass for France. 

He was lying in wait for the spring-time : then — the 
victories having made a full security, his rivals having 
disappeared — he would come in and save the nation 
from the Terror, he would abandon the Committee : he 
would impose his perfect Republic and he would write 
on the first page of a new constitution the name of God 
and the nature of his simple worship. 

This imagination of his was the more emphasised 
by the coincidence of his private view and of that of 
the Committee in the matter of the " madmen " : the 
Herbertists. These men were the special obstacles to his 
theory. Their looseness, their blind and negative revolt, 
their very persons were repulsive to his ideal. In the 
disasters of the summer, when the extreme part of 
the nation gave them an arm, they had imposed them- 
selves somewhat upon his government ; the Committee 
had been compelled to follow them. But he had watched 
and dogged them with that ceaseless attention and 
readiness that was his unfailing method ; with them, as 
with Brissot, as with the Constitutionals of the early 
Revolution he had followed the tactics of yielding and 
disappearing, gathering into himself such strength as he 
had, and when a breathing space was given suddenly 
exercising that strength. This kind of action which was 
as much a part of his nature as his reserved gestures and 
his power of ceaseless, similar writing, conquered once 
more and for the last time. 

I have shown how he took advantage of and gripped 
the Herbertists in the anti-religious crusade. How he 
threw them. In that effort he had received, from the 



288 ROBESPIERRE 

side of Danton, the unexpected aid of Desmoulins. He 
liad used it. He pressed the extremists (whom he 
thought to be ruining the State) so close that they be- 
came hunted men. He caused Carrier to be recalled from 
Nantes. He posed as the sanctuary between the ven- 
geance of the Republicans and the Yendeans. He was 
actually the saviour of those moderate or silent men 
whom the hysteria of Carrier at Nantes would have thrust 
into a common holocaust with the insurgents against 
whom those very moderates had heroically defended the 
city.^ 

There was a month of hesitation during which no 
step was taken. The Committee still called for the con- 
tinuance of the Terror, Desmoulins, now thrust wholly 
back upon Danton, continued to call for clemency; 
behind the movement, though he spoke so little, it was 
known that the great voice of Danton himself gave orders 
to the staff of the induls^ents and demanded the return 
to peace. In his drawing-room of the Cour du Com- 
merce, below the rooms of Lucille and Camille, was held 
almost daily the council of war that might succeed in 
opening the prisons. 

I will not deny that Robespierre feared this also 
and for twenty reasons. He feared that the Committee 
of Clemency, if it originated too early or from any 
brain save his own, would destroy his leadership. 
He feared something creative, passionate, and immediate 
in the character of Danton, which would have swamped 
such a man as he, had it received strength to 
come out again into the arena. He was angry at the 
open opposition of '■ No. 5 " of the Vieux Cordelier, at the 
frank Dantonism of " No. 6," which seemed to say to the 

^ In my own family there is clear proof of this, for my great-grand- 
father, a firm republican, was thrown into prison by Carrier. His wife, 
desiring to save him, thought at once of Robespierre. She travelled to 
Paris, caused a note to be delivered to him, and her husband was saved. 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 289 

populace, " Forget Robespierre and forget the govern- 
ment. You are the General Will and you have but to 
demand the end of the Terror." He was angry because 
his great mystery, his puppet-show of a special police 
had been almost exposed by the attack on H^ron,-*^ 
but still, his principal care for the moment was the 
destruction of the extreme Left, and he succeeded. 

On the 4th of March (14th Ventose) Carrier, the 
maddest of the Avengers, being returned from his massacres 
and drownings at Nantes, destituted of power, confined 
to his club of the Cordeliers, and pacing and raging in 
idleness like a cheetah caged, the Left (which thought 
itself the Commune and even the city, but was in truth 
only a group of men) attempted a wholly insufficient 
revolt. The Cordeliers met. They ordered crape to be 
veiled over the Declaration of the Rights of Man, " Until 
the people should have recovered their rights by the 
destruction of the faction." The " faction " meant not only 
Danton and clemency, it meant also Robespierre and his 
policy of restraining the proconsuls in the provinces. 
Carrier himself spoke like a Bacchanal using mere 
symbols. " I mean by the faction the men who calum- 
niate the guillotine." Herbert still full of his private 
quarrel, of the check Robespierre had inflicted on him 

^ Here there is some hesitation in judgment. So many contemporaries 
lived to remember what they called "the dictatorship of Robespierre," 
and insisted with such unanimity (when Michelet questioned them) that 
H^ron was the "Black Friar" of the revolutionary leader, that both 
Michelet and history have accepted it as a fact. This much of the legend 
is true : Robespierre did exercise (through a system of reporters, agents 
and clerks that centred in H^ron), a powerful pressure upon the police 
system and even upon the lower committee. Nevertheless I maintain the 
opinion which I have no space to develop that he had no real power. 
Individuals appealed to him because he had become a legend, and by this 
system of agents and of intrigues he could often do a great deal for 
individuals, but on the great lines of national policy, power certainly lay 
with the majority of the great Committee. It is impossible to notice the 
vacillation of Robespierre in the matter of the Vieux Cordelier and of the 
policy of moderation without being convinced of the truth of this view. 

T 



290 ROBESPIERRE 

in the autumn, of tlie reversal which Robespierre more 
than any other had forced upon his policy of unchris- 
tianising France, remembering the way that Robespierre 
had hesitated and seemed to inspire Desmoulins in 
the beginning of his career — Herbert, who saw in all 
this the end of the revolutionary effort and a kind of 
treason, the giving up of the keys, put the thing 
squarely. 

" When I talk of the faction," he called out across 
the vaults of the hall of the Cordeliers, " I mean those 
who saved the seventy-three in October." 

They proceeded to a farcical insurrection. The want 
that had been chronic in Paris from two years before '89, 
and that lasted on till the organisation of a new society 
(the Revolution, in fact) produced the modern wealth of 
France — that famine they thought their ally. It betrayed 
them. The populace ascribed the lack of food to the 
Herbertists themselves, to the ravages of the revolutionary 
armies, and to that way of theirs by which they went on 
raging for impossible extremes, as though men needed 
neither food nor repose. 

The frost and silence of the last of winter con- 
demned these men. No section was in their favour ; 
a certain number of sections denounced them by name. 
In the night of the 13th of March they were arrested; 
after a trial that was a mere sentence upon such wild 
pleas as revolutions alone imagine, they were condemned, 
and executed on the 24th of March. With Herbert, Clootz, 
and their companions ended the faction of the extremists. 
The "revolutionary army" (gangs terrorising the home 
departments) was disbanded, and there was nothing more 
heard of the policy of mere vengeance. The Commune 
ceased even to pretend that it was Paris. It became (the 
committee allowed such toys) the machine of Robespierre. 
All the power of the Left had vanished. There still 
remained the moderates, the Right. 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 291 

With tlie fall of Herbert it might be thought that the 
calm was beginning. Kobespierre had destroyed that side 
of the battle which he was known to have disfavoured. 
It seemed natural that he should lead their opponents, 
the moderates, to victory. 

There passed, upon the contrary, a scene that finally 
proves the hollowness of his domination. 

He had been attacked for a month by such an illness 
as had already, four or five times since the gathering of 
the States-General, kept him apart from the debates. 
Mention of it would be of no moment did it not prove a 
point which should never be forgotten in his career. In 
his silence (he was absent from the Committee, from the 
Convention, and from the Jacobins for forty days) the 
Terror increased. It was not his presence nor his initia- 
tive that moved it. He had left his room to receive as 
good news from the Committee the fall of Herbert. 
Immediately afterwards he was asked in his turn for 
the Dantonists. 

It was the moment in which Robespierre was most 
tenacious of his popular leadership, parading it.-^ The 
demand for the heads of the Indulgents was not made by 
the workers only. St. Just, who made the whole busi- 
ness his, whose speech destroyed the men of the Vieux 
Cordelier, demanded it. Herault de Sechelles (Danton's 
chief friend, and destined to die with him) had already 
been dismissed from the committee and arrested — it is 
probable that every member except Robespierre and 
Lindet approved of the demand. Lindet, head of the 
commissariat, refused bluntly to sign. " I am here to 
feed the people, not to kill patriots." 

What Robespierre said or did will never be known. 
This much can be conjectured, that he protested, hesi- 

1 There is even a question whether he did not at this moment offer the 
command of Paris to Buonaparte in the place of Hanriot, whom the mode- 
rates were attacking as they had attacked Herbert. 



292 ROBESPIERRE 

tated — tlien yielded ; and, having yielded, went the full 
length of his fall, consented to help in every way, and 
despatched a business that troubled him Hke a crime, 
burying it away under the earth, as though with Danton's 
body Danton's murder could also decay. 

On the very night before the two committees met to 
decide upon what proved to be the assassination of the 
Kepublic, Humbert, that had been Robespierre's host in 
the Rue Sanitonge during his first two years in Paris, 
asked him to dine. Danton was there. They sat together, 
Robespierre silent and troubled, Danton reviving to the 
rough gaiety of '92. He attempted, with an advance 
that was brusque but courageous, to launch a poHtical 
discussion, and, turning to Robespierre, he asked why 
there were still so many victims. 

" Royalists and conspirators 1 can understand ; but 
those who are innocent ? " 

Robespierre answered with a false phrase — 

" And who says that any innocent man has perished ? " 

He plunged back into an uneasy silence : waited a 
moment, then rose and abruptly disappeared. 

Next day he took upon himself the weight of this 
friend's blood when he consented to the demand of the 
Committee. 

I repeat, he consented. He certainly did not pro- 
pose ; as certainly, I would maintain, he attempted at 
first to ward off the blow from the indulgents, but he 
dared not try a fall with the Committee. 

Upon what is such a conviction based ? In the strict 
spirit ot modern analysis it is difficult to reply. Robes- 
pierre furnished the notes upon which St. Just made the 
report that silenced the Convention. They still exist in an 
Enghsh collection : they are hurried, disjointed. When 
the Convention hesitated, it was he who spoke most 
determinedly against hearing Danton and Desmoulins at 
the bar, who called such procedm^e " privilege," and 



-^ v> 



■^: 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 293 

■who, perhaps, sealed the fate of his colleague. Upon the 
surface — if the Committee of Public Safety be taken as 
certain and united, and if only what appears be con- 
sidered — he was among the first, even the leader, of those 
who determined the sudden arrest on the night of the 
3 1 st of March. 

Nevertheless he did not lead, he yielded. The proofs 
of it are wholly moral, but they are convincing. Con- Vv^a V*a35^ - 
sider that he had not yet, and did not in moments far .ArC| ^ 

more perilous, sacrifice any one to his mere ambition. 
That ambition tempted and at last ruined him, is the 
argument of this chapter ; that he exercised it pitilessly, 
or made it a permanent and conscious motive is what not 
only the few salient facts presented in this book, but 
every one of the thousand documents and anecdotes re- 
maining combine to deny. In so far as such ambitions 
have something in them glorious, he was quite lacking in 
that sense of glory ; in so far as they have in them some- 
thing careless of principle and violent, every portrait of 
him, every recollection of him, omits such a feature. His 
hardness was all of logic ; his ambition was a thing coming 
after success, overlying and corrupting, but never entering 
the close fibre of this man. 

Moreover, Danton was not then his danger. Perhaps 
in the past June, perhaps even in the crisis of December, 
he might have been afraid of a continuous rivalry. But 
in March ? Danton and his friends had been uncertain or 
silent for over a month. They had rejoiced indeed at the 
fall of Herbert, but they had been the object of no public 
adulation nor of any public appeal since December. There 
was but one thing that Danton menaced — the Terror. 
The destruction of Herbert, which (after his revolt) the 
Committee thought a necessity, made that menace more 
formidable. After such an example Danton had but to 
speak (so it seemed) and the descent towards peace 
would begin. But Robespierre was not concerned to 



294 ROBESPIERRE 

defend tlie Terror. On the contrary lie had been, if 
anything, its opponent. At its cessation he would have 
received an added popularity, and he was therefore aim- 
ing at such a cessation. 

There are two further arguments, which appear so 
light that I hesitate to bring them forward ; but they 
are so convincing to those who go right into the docu- 
ments and the atmosphere of '94, that it would be a pity 
to omit them — they are, first the exclamation of Billaud- 
Varrenes four months later, secondly the character of the 
notes used by St. Just in his indictment of the Indul- 
gents. 

It is a matter to which I will return in its place, and 
which I bring forward here for but a moment. On the 
day that Robespierre fell, in Thermidor, Billaud-Varrenes 
was one of his most violent accusers. He was a man of 
defiant and straightforward language, bull-necked, violent, 
immoderate in gesture. There came from his extreme 
anger a rush of words that were neither calculated nor 
suited to the occasion; there were absent, therefore, all 
the elements of a pre-constituted plan. Well, in that 
harangue the first thing he remembered was Robespierre 
attempting to defend Danton in the committee. Consider 
that we have no records of what passed within those 
walls where the Ten sat judging France. The memoirs 
of the men who survived are necessarily excuses, and 
are often contradictory. Barrere, the fullest of them, is 
also the least trustworthy, and I take that attitude of 
Billaud's, in Thermidor, to be a piece of sudden passion, 
a cherished accusation worth all the later testimony, 
even if that testimony accused Robespierre (which it 
does not) of having procured the arrest of the Indulgents. 

As to the notes given to St. Just, I fear it is impos- 
sible, without a reproduction of them and a comparison 
of them with Robespierre's other writings, to convince 
my readers of their quality. Nervous, hurried, discon- 



TEMPTATION OF ROBESPIERRE 295 

nected, they are unique in the mass of documents that 
Kobespierre left behind him. There is not present in 
them that choice of words which is hardly ever missing 
even in his most casual writings. There are one or two 
erasures, but they are not the result of thought and 
fastidiousness (as were commonly his second phrases), 
they are the result of mere haste. He has written 
a word that would be useless, meaningless, or illegible, 
and he substitutes, in almost equal haste, another. 
That is the testimony of the writing. It has every 
mark of a document demanded at a moment's notice by 
his friend, and drafted in the hour before he spoke. 

For, his vote once given in the Committee, he perse- 
vered as men persevere in a monstrous evil. After such 
a vote, Danton saved would be Danton an enemy, and 
Danton an enemy following the very path of popular 
clemency that Robespierre intended to follow. Such a 
Danton would have meant the end of the Committee, 
the end of that ideal of a half-religious, half-political 
dominion which Robespierre thought now to be in his 
grasp, and with which he desired " to make this nation 
the refuge of the oppressed and the terror of oppressors." 

He gave his vote, and fell into the fatal groove which 
that beginning made for him ; he was to race down it, 
through the aggravation of the Terror, to his own death, 
and was to hear in the agony of Thermidor the name of 
Danton striking him down like a spear. 

I have described elsewhere the trial, the condemna- 
tion and the death of the Indulgents. Here I am con- 
cerned only with the man who had permitted this 
sacrifice, and who shut himself in alone throughout that 
morning and refused himself to all. 

Hidden in his room over the narrow yard whence 
the conquerors had run out to see the tumbrils go by, 
he heard the roaring of the crowd, the creaking of the 



296 ROBESPIERRE 

heavy wheels. Could lie believe these men to be guilty, 
or the Republic to be saved by such an abandonment? 
He sat there with his set face in the little room, beginning 
to see himself as the Republic incarnate. 

Therein lay the core of this great tragedy — he saw 
some other greater thing that was not himself, but a 
vision of the RepubHc bearing his own features, and 
began to worship it as did the crowd. He thought this 
awful day would make that vision of the Republic in 
some way real, and he confused the final advent of pure 
freedom and of absolutely equal law with the vain but 
portentous imagery of such a cloud. This sacrifice of 
certain right for some larger but vanitary thing worked 
in his mind like a poison, and on this first warm evening 
of the year his inner security, which the vacillation of the 
winter had already shaken, left him altogether. 

After the sun had set over the guillotine, and as his 
room darkened, he felt that the tumbrils had dragged 
his spirit after them, and from that moment he was 
drawn towards his end. 



CHAPTER IX 
THE FOUR MONTHS — t— 

It is well to put to every division of a book a name that 
shall indicate its scope and thesis : there are many that 
might tempt one other than this which I have put at 
the head of the last stretch of the race. It would have 
been consonant with the vague tradition we have of the 
Kevolution and with the false unity which the mind 
lends to every story, to call it " The Dictator." Kobes- 
pierre gradually come to the supreme power in the State, 
exercising it with an arbitrary will, punished by a sudden 
revolt, would satisfy the spirit of drama. It is such a 
simple reading as has commonly been adopted of the 
tragedy ; but it is false. Had I adopted that reading I 
could have made his story reach a natural end and have 
set the notes to a harmony. But the end was abrupt 
and unexpected, the harmony was absent, at least so far 
as his own life is concerned. If harmony was there, it is 
not to be discovered in a simple play of individual re- 
tribution, but only in the great purpose which gives to 
the history of Europe the movement of a providence. 
He was never dictator. To call him that is to overlook 
all modern research. 

I might have spoken of this little time as " The 
Terror " ; the Terror in chief, the Climax of it. It killed 
as many in seven weeks as had fallen in Paris during 
five years.^ To the onlooker it was nothing but the 

^ Up to the law of Prairial there had been 1220 executions in Paris. 
You may add to these a hundred or so at the most for the period before 
the Terror. In the seven weeks succeeding the law there were 1376. 

897 



298 ROBESPIERRE 

delirium of the Terror. To the imprisoned, noting this 
vast accession to their cells, this daily catastrophe; 
trembling at the enormous lists, and waiting each for 
his name to be called down the stone corridors, it was 
nothing but the delirium of the Terror. But to Robes- 
pierre it was not that at all ; he had helped to lead to 
it, but he neither desired to make it, nor did he 
use it. 

I have called the period " The Four Months." If there 
were a house in a London street where some tragedy un- 
explained, still debated, had passed, and of which the 
mystery should haunt you to the point of demanding 
an analysis, you could not preface that analysis with a 
word indicative of a definite solution, for no definite 
solution could be reached in your recital : you could but 
give for title the name — the mere number of the place : 
concentrate your reader upon the walls and windows 
which stood there dumb, not having yielded a secret; 
whose interest, indeed, lay in the doubt that attached 
to them. 

So it is with Robespierre. I have put at the head 
of his time of power — or failure — that title of " The 
Four Months," because the limits of time alone are 
single and clear, within them there stood an intricate 
and ravelled process whose uncertain character I shall 
take to be somewhat as follows. 

Robespierre from his inner room, his shrine, at the 
Duplays passed for the Master of the Republic : Robes- 
pierre in the public mouth was the name of the Republic, 
of the Terror, of everything. Robespierre in his own 
mind was willing, was perhaps persuaded, to think him- 
self the master of the Republic. Robespierre in the 
great Committee — which alone was the true centre of 
power, which alone could command men, bayonets, guns, 
and money — was the outer man, the politician. He 
talked, he stood in the sun, he seemed their power in- 



THE FOUR MONTHS 299 

carnate, but to tliem witMn that sumptuous room,-^ he 
was the object of a mingled jealousy and irritation. He 
did no work, he reproached them, he absented himself. 
When he would have made the Terror excessive it was 
but for a moment and for the ends of his religion. When 
they were determined to persevere or extend its extreme 
rigour as a kind of martial law, he bickered and quarrelled, 
finding that rigour of theirs opposed to this Rousseauan 
religion of his. I say, therefore, that Robespierre passing 
— his mere name and reputation passing— for the Re- 
public, accepted the homage at once, used it as things 
to him essential, to the Committee valueless. I say that 
he thought of himself as the Republic in person, and 
that every word spoken in the Rue St. Honore confirmed 
him in that role. Evidently then when the Terror passed 
into gross conflict with common sense and necessity, 
when the madness that had seized the Republic had to be 
caught by some handle and put down, that handle, in spite 
of himself, was Robespierre. He had passed for Power, 
he had to suffer as though he had been really Power. 
He had brought into the Terror personal quarrels that 
made it the easier to combine against him. By his 
character he provoked reaction. The committee were 
glad to sacrifice him — they were unwittingly sacrificing 
themselves. And when he fell there fell also with 
him that high strain of democracy absolute which for 
an unnaturally long period of time he had been able 
to inspire in the populace. His violent death was a 
gasp and tremor in which the common world and its 
necessities returned. The whole vision of the great year 

^ I say "sumptuous" on the authority of Mercier. Now Mercier is 
a liar, but I can believe him here : the small employee coming in from 
time to time to bring papers to his masters, finding them seated in that 
royal room on the ground-floor and overlooking from their great inlaid 
table the gardens of the palace, splendid in the hot summer of '94, and 
the terrace of the old kings, carried away what was evidently a powerful 
and direct impression. 



300 ROBESPIERRE 

expired. It has left only tliat permanent part of visions ; 
the troubling void, hunger, memory of the ideal which 
will still work in our society till it is compelled to the 
final change. We are driven to our unknown to-day by 
the memory of '93. 

Let me show his centre of effort and describe what 
influence surrounded him as he approached the comedy 
of power. For three years he had lived in that in- 
fluence ; it had accentuated as time proceeded ; but now 
that with the spring of 1794 he was lifted above all sup- 
ports, and left with a gulf beneath him which determined 
his utter ruin, the vast height of the role, and the 
startling inadequacy of the actor are best grasped 
through an appreciation of the home in which he moved 
and the physical things that formed his most immediate 
and continuous world. You will see in the picture of 
that home of his how his vast renown rose from little 
things, and was like a great smoke from a small fire of 
weeds on a clear evening. 

And by this I am very far from saying that the 
humility and obscurity of his refuge should suggest a 
meanness of the mind or an inadequacy of the spirit 
to its mission. It was among the chief glories of the 
eighteenth century that a man was regarded, I do not 
say independently of adventitious rank or office, but 
certainly independently of his material wealth in spite 
of all the subtle suggestions that this coarsest and falsest 
of criteria may carry with it. The Jacobite tradition had 
been able, two generations before, to flourish in an atmos- 
phere of misery and to feed on dreams; yet another 
generation and Rousseau might be blamed for parasitical 
attachment to the great, but never for a desire to 
accumulate or to deal ; Goldsmith's brave lyrics were not 
tarnished by the disorder of a garret, his spendthrift 
negligence did nothing to hurt his fame. Washington 



THE FOUR MONTHS 301 

was still a hero in valley forge, lie would liave remained 
as great had he died in the rags and frost of that winter. 
And of all the men who thus claimed immunity from 
the judgments of greed, none carried the tradition higher 
than the revolutionaries. Men, for the most part of a 
solid professional position, they impoverished themselves 
by their own enthusiasms. Condorcet dying starved, a 
refugee from the miserable garret of St. Sulpice, Danton 
bequeathing a pitiful and ruined fortune, Carnot in old 
age wrapped up and stiff before the empty grate of his 
exile — three men at utter variance in their political and 
social ideals testify together to the common stoicism and 
to the common freedom of the great souls that remade 
the world. Such as chose to save their comfort and 
increase their revenues by supple treason, the Tallyrands, 
the Fouches, and the rest, were branded by their contem- 
poraries with an odium that no later softness has found 
it possible to efface; for in those days the interest of 
haggling seemed paltry compared with the tide of living, 
and bribery that is the lever of stable governments was 
not hidden by any decent and necessary veil of hypocrisy. 
That time, whose fault it was to over-glorify the spirit of 
man, gave it at least a worthy plane of action and could 
see it existing of itself, distinct and untrammelled. 

I would not then convey any contrast of poverty with 
fame. Moreover the household in which Robespierre 
found his repose was not poor. Duplay's income, apart 
from the earnings of his trade, amounted to a full six 
hundred pounds a year, and he had retired upon the 
proceeds of his savings until the outbreak of the Revolu- 
tion, and the empty houses upon his hands compelled 
him to re-enter business. He occupied a good leasehold, 
of which the rent was but an eighth of his revenue, and 
even found himself able to purchase it when the sale 
of monastic land was decreed. The spirit, also, that 
animated this home was sound and dignified; it was a 



302 ROBESPIERRE 

good bourgeois place, sucli as France grows by nature in 
thousands, and such as, in their great increase during the 
last hundred years, now form the stable basis of her 
power. 

But Robespierre set in this frame — Robespierre 
to whom the populace had lent such splendid imagina- 
tions — was mesquin ; that is, paltry and ringing false ; 
he was something that seemed unworthy of his theme, 
insipid and anaemic. In the intimacy of this man in 
whom the nation had chosen to discover an harmonious 
congeries of great qualities one might cynically expect 
many things. A charlatan; one drinking fame; one 
seizing the moment to mould a plan — it would not have 
disappointed a melodramatic observer to find him sombre 
and silent. 

Well, he was none of these things. The society 
of his privacy pleased him because it could offer him 
a perpetual adulation of an unheroic kind. There he 
could pour out daily for years the excellent but un- 
developed principles which animated his public utterances. 
The very virtues of simplicity, sobriety and rectitude 
which he honestly valued, yet furnished him also with a 
domestic audience whose knowledge of the world was 
necessarily limited and who could find a mild perpetual 
pleasure in the reiteration of just maxims. So perhaps I 
can best express the quality of the interior he fitted 
so well by saying that if some widely travelled and vigor- 
ously minded man — and there were many such who 
followed his public character with an absorbed interest 
and even with devotion — if such a man had followed 
him home to mark his domestic and real life he would 
not have been shocked or angered or transported or 
roused, but merely bored. 

An honest man from the great hills of Auvergne, 
one that had "got on," was his silent, devoted and 
proud host. A young man coming in almost every 



THE FOUR MONTHS • 303 

evening, to touch tlie spinet in his reveries, to sit silent 
absorbing experience, was one of bis principal worship- 
pers : a boy in whose veins ran the blood of Michael 
Angelo ; a Buonarotti enamoured of this last Ke- 
naissance. Lebas, just, unlaughing, very brave ; St. 
Just, grown less devoted, his eyes not resting from the 
wars, were his supporters. The eldest daughter of the 
house, Eleanor, was the betrothed who had known very 
little of affection, who sat like the rest in the circle of 
the man. Whatever it was in him that made it possible 
for others thus to follow — I presume his faith — radiated 
here intensely over a little group as, outwardly, it had 
radiated over and drawn up the faces of the whole 
people. They tolerated even the perpetual repetition 
of his presence. The great mirror of the mantelpiece 
repeated him ; the great full-length portrait opposite the 
door ; a metal bust upon the writing-table ; prints upon 
the wall, repeated him. In the obsession of Eobespierre, 
night after night they watched and missed reality and in 
that obsession of himself his own mind also was at last 
fixed and blind. And so, as Paris outside escaped from 
the influence, they still, and he himself, remained subject 
to it. But St. Just was a little silent ; he had begun to 
feel footing in the real world and had already understood 
the soldiers. 

From that cavern or temple which even now, rebuilt 
a century since, has something secret and remote about 
it, his orders issued; and his power, founded on an 
imaginary, proceeded for the moment absolute over the 
city. He had permitted the death of Danton; this 
negative sin pushed him on to positive extravagance 
in policy. 

He had been compelled to admit first the Terror, then 
the exaggeration of the Terror, now he was compelled 
to follow it as it washed out to ruin. His new need 
dragged him in the wake of the committee. If he was to 



304 ROBESPIERRE 

be master (and he was already in a fashion master) how 
could he attack the vehicle that bore him ? It is charac- 
teristic of the men who will be masters (they are never 
masters, for a man is only the master by consent of the 
community) that they misapprehend the forces to their 
hand. If they hear some shouting in the street they 
take it for the People ; if they read six newspapers they 
say, " this is Public Opinion " ; and if by an unhappy 
accident they enter government, they take ten men 
round a table to be the nation. So it was with Robes- 
pierre. He had no finger on the pulse of France. He 
heard minorities — dwindling crowds — still shouting in 
the street ; he sat with the rest of the Committee in the 
great room of the Tuileries; he thought the tide was 
still rising, and he consented to rise with it. In truth it 
had begun to ebb. 

What would a true leader have done on the edge of 
the deliverance, on the eve of Fleurus? He would 
have declared his conversion to normal law, and Paris 
and all France would have made him more than a king. 
He would even now, even after the execution of Danton, 
have said, " This is the end. The Republic may breathe 
again." But Robespierre never understood breathing and 
living things. 

The very day that Danton's head fell, the last shadow 
of the old executive disappeared. Carnot proposed the 
putting in commission of all the ministry: the subjec- 
tion of these bodies to the Committee of Public Safety. 

Carnot a few days later desired to arrest Hoche ; ^ 
that grave step was taken. Did Robespierre protest ? No 
one can tell. The veil covering these deliberations has 
never been lifted. He did not sign. But he was for 
those distant armies so palpably the ruler that Hoche 
wrote to him saying, " You know my virtues and I yours. 

1 The decree is signed on the i ith April. It is wholly in Carnot's 
handwriting, save one word, an unimportant erasure. 



THE FOUR MONTHS 305 

Save me if you can. If you cannot save me from my 
enemies, I shall die still praising your name."^ Some 
one spoke and saved Hoche. He remained in prison 
unmolested. 

I repeat, what he did within the Committee cannot 
be known. It is certain that he argued, contradicted, 
offended, alluded a httle of his popular mastery; occa- 
sionally threatened. It is equally certain that, with all 
his repugnance for signing lists of the condemned, he 
permitted the desperate policy of the Committee to take 
its course. His real life was not in that room, it was 
in the exterior and empty authority in which he de- 
lighted. The Committee said, as it were, "Do what 
you will with your popularity so long as you do not 
break our labour." Kobespierre said, " Do what you 
will with your plodding and your military executions so 
long as I can use your name for my Idea." And the 
populace and the Convention said, " This is Eobespierre; 
he is the Kepublic, and perhaps also the Committee; let 
us follow." These three misunderstandings are the whole 
mystery of the spring of '94. 

In the legend so created for him he revelled. On 
the 7th of May he preached another — almost the last — 
of those essays on religion and morals that did in truth 
bind his hearers, though they have exasperated posterity. 
Robespierre was excellent in his texts; in his exegesis 
intolerably wearisome. He had said to Elizabeth Duplay, 
that was about to be his sister-in-law, this charming 

^ If ^any one thinks it easy to write history, let him read this little 
story. Hoche is, by the admission of every one, the bravest and the 
frankest of the young generals. He writes to Kobespierre as to a friend, 
and so convinced are the bureaucrats of the reality of his friendship that 
the letter is kept from Eobespierre. It never reached him. Carnot, on 
the testimony of all history, is an honest man ; all the Carnots have 
always been of the most loyal republican strain ; yet Carnot (on the 
authority of his own son, "Memoirs," i. 450) says, "I had all the pains in 
the world to save Hoche from Eobespierre." It is evidently a misunder- 
standing and a quarrel, but what passed 7 

U 



3o6 ROBESPIERRE 

thing : " Little one, you are laughing at religion ; you do 
not yet know quite how much comfort and hope is 
hidden in the depths of a permanent trust in God." 
But when he would develop this before a Parliament, 
when he would impose it upon a nation, he rang hollow, 
and seemed merely the dictator turned priest. Why ? 
Because he was altogether wanting in that principal 
faculty of a creator of laws — the sentiment that a nation 
is a person, and must be addressed with the directness 
and the humour with which one would address the 
individual. 

I need not quote from that long speech ; it would be 
a repetition of the whole five years — for he at least never 
by thought added an inch to his mental stature. It 
had in it a little of the old irony. " The neighbouring 
governments approach the sublime ; at this moment they 
chronicle with tenderness every action of their kings." 
He struck the new note of the Four months in trampling 
down the Herbertists that were gone, men who would 
have turned irreligion into a system, and who made an 
effort to thrust out the generosity of nature herself. The 
end of the whole was the sentence by which, perhaps, 
his mixed memory is best retained : — 

" The French people recognise the being of a God 
and they recognise the immortality of the Soul." 

With that phrase he thought that he had laid down 
the principle of pure religion, that from it the future 
would flow. For he thought (and all thought with him) 
that he and his contemporaries stood on nothing old 
and were pure creators; but behind them came the living 
church trembling with a hundred dogmas and as multiple 
as her innumerable years, as old as bread and wine. So 
his one truth went up therein, like breath in a frost ; to- 
day it is acknowledged and forgotten. 

The poor remnant of the Convention, " the French 
people," voted as they were bid. The populace also was 



THE FOUR MONTHS 307 

in that hall unseen, it also had a great unconscious vote 
to cast. It voted the renascence of Catholicism. 

He was certainly surrounded with enthusiasm at this 
moment ; caressed. The letters which he kept so care- 
fully, the vast accumulation which Courtois in great part 
destroyed, now reached their greatest intensity, witnessed 
to frenzy in the auditory or proved in a hundred absurdi- 
ties to what an extent his mere name had passed up into 
permanent meaning and had become the new epoch.^ 

It was at this moment also that his apotheosis had 
reached the point of exciting counter fanaticism. In 
a remote, damp and sombre house an aged mystic, 
a certain mad Catherine Th^ot, held a secret society 
of others as mad as herself. Gerle, the ex-Carthusian 
that had met Robespierre in the first Parliament years 
before, was there ; so were a doctor of the Orleans, and 
an old countess. They would sit upon blue thrones and 
leave in the midst a white throne for Robespierre, " the 
Messiah." ^ It remained empty. It was the moment in 
which (20th of May) Ladmiral the clerk had asked for 
him vaguely, wishing to kill him, and finding him out 
had walked round to CoUot d'Herbois and shot and 
missed him. It was the moment when Cecile Renauld, 
a girl of twenty, sauntered after dark, at nine, into the 
courtyard of the Duplays with two knives in her market- 
basket (22nd of May). There was even a talk of a plot 
aojainst the Committee. St. Just was called back from 



^ At Marian in the church they sang, perhaps for a victory, the Te Deum. 
At its close the people cheered for the Kepublic. Then some solemn 
man remembered Robespierre. They cheered for Robespierre, and the 
commune of Marian sent him a letter describing the incident. It is 
interesting to remark that the sister of Mirabeau also wrote to him 
at this epoch. If the phrase, "Dear Robespierre," seems a little cold, 
it must be remembered that it was from a woman whose brother had been 
disinterred and his ashes thrown to the winds. 

2 There exists also a touching letter from an old man in a lost village 
who calls him " The Messiah of the New World." 



3o8 ROBESPIERRE 

the army of the north,^ came to Paris for a week, saw the 
nonsense of it and went back to his soldiers. 

But the key to the end was already supplied in the 
phrase of one of these thousand letters. " A reputation 
which not even enemies attempt to assail." ^ That was the 
truth, and it was the particular truth that killed him. 
No one could deny his sincerity, no one at that time 
dreamt of denying his creed. He tortured men with 
consistency. They could not destroy him with argument, 
they attacked him at last with the sudden revolt of 
nature. Bar^re in his account to the Convention of the 
attempt of C^cile Eenauld supplied, unconsciously, another 
argument. He spoke (and it was true enough) of 
the way in which Robespierre had become abroad a 
personification of the Revolution : for the English, who 
made him out a kind of tyrant ; for the Germans, who 
turned him into a proverb — we know now that he might , 
have added, " for that peaceful foreigner posterity who I 
judges things impartially and is often wrong." He meant 
his appeal to mean, " We are specially indignant at the 
attempt on Robespierre's life, because he is taken by most 
ignorant people for the Republic itself, and therefore the 
attempt was an attempt on the Republic." But the Con- 
vention was thinking silently as it listened, " Why do 
ignorant people think him to be the Republic ? " 

The Feast of the Deity, the solemnity that his speech 
of a month before had caused to be decreed, followed 
that passage of enthusiasm and danger. He caused 
himself (it would be pedantic to use any other phrase 
— -the Convention was not free) to be elected President 
for the second time upon the Fourth of June ; on the 8 th 
Paris had its fill of Symbolism, and the ridiculous, which 
dogs symbolism as the fear of waking will dog a good 

1 This letter was signed by all the committee, and oddly enough twice 
over by Kobespierre. 

2 The expression is in Vaquier's letter at the end of Courtois' collection 
and report. 



THE FOUR MONTHS 309 

dream at the end of the night, caught up that festival 
in mid way and broke it even as it was acting. 

To Robespierre, who was never touched by the 
ridiculous, this feast was entrancing. By nine o'clock 
of that brilliant summer morning he was already pacing, 
impatient, fasting, in the halls of the Tuileries. 

Vilate met him and said, " Have you breakfasted ? " 

"No," said Robespierre, "... look out at that 
garden and at all the people flocking. Nature is coming 
in. ..." 

Vilate proposed that he should breakfast. They went 
up hastily to eat something in Vilate's little room at 
the top of the Pavilion de Flore, and Robespierre, still 
absorbed, went to the attic window more than once, looked 
out from that height and repeated — 

" That part of humanity is the most absorbing of all. 
... I could say the whole world was here . . . there 
are tyrants who will grow pale when they hear of 
this. . . ."1 

Then under the growing heat he went through the 
show of cardboard and strong colours burning the statue 
of Atheism, walking at the head of the Parliament to the 
Champ de Mars, wrapped up in the applause of the 
crowd, and in the music, and in the new, simple and 
perfect religion he was giving to the world. All the 
while his little figure in its white nankeen breeches and 
blue coat was overwhelmed by the great tricolour sash 
and the great tricolour plumes of the full dress : it was 
the only time that he approached in appearance the 
deputies on mission, for he was never with the armies. 
But a man that had known our Europe better than 
David would have concealed among these symbols a 
figure of Laughter, tiptoe, with the legs of a faun and 
pointed ears. 

He came back to his home filled — ^falsely — with the 

^ "Vilate," p. 34 of the original edition. 



310 ROBESPIERRE 

sense of power. He came back happy, and found happi- 
ness there: Lebas' little son had been born that day. 
Then in the full illusion of the opening summer, seeing 
himself everywhere, and feeling France as though it were 
mixed with his own blood, he imagined a full authority ; 
he drafted the law of the loth of June — the 22nd 
Prairial ^ — and began to reveal himself as he was. It was 
just two days after he had most appeared as a symbol 
over France that he began the plunge down into reality 
and recognition. 

The decree of that day — a decree drawn up in his 
own hand ^ — proposed by his man, Couthon, forced upon 
the Assembly by his voice and the vague menace of his 
omnipotent reputation — may be stated in the single word, 
tyranny ; but it was a tyranny such as never could last 
for a year on this earth, such as no remote lord of Africa 
could have exercised over his own bought slaves. 

It had one major clause : it suppressed the defence. 
The revolutionary tribunal was not based upon forms. 
It was a court-martial, the mere servant of the Terror. But 
it had maintained the exterior of law. It was not the 
right of defence that led to the numerous acquittals, or 
that imperilled the yet more numerous condemnations. 
But the defence delayed and gave a formality to the action 
of the court. It made it civilian; it forbade summary 
execution. The law of Prairial was designed to make the 
Committee as absolute as a conqueror is over a city taken 
by assault. 

I have said that Robespierre made this law ; forced 
it upon the Convention. He desired, then, to make the 
Committee tyrant — and he thought the Committee was 

^ But he is not the author of the law of the 17th April, which summoned 
all cases of conspiracy and treason to Paris. Here, as so often, he is doing 
nothing but following on the action of others, since the ]aw of the 22nd 
Prairial would have been nothing but for this predecessor. 

2 As was also the instruction to the committee that were terrorising 
the south, the "Commission d'Orange," 21st Floreal. 



THE FOUR MONTHS 311 

one with him, as he thought the nation was. He did 
more. When Bourdon, of the Oise/ a man whom he 
fixed for destruction, claimed that no member of the 
Assembly could be brought before the revolutionary- 
tribunal without the consent of the Assembly, he vigo- 
rously maintained that the discussion should be let drop. 
" Give us the strength," he cried in a sudden inspiration, 
** to bear the great burden you have laid upon our 
shoulders." That is, make us dictators absolute, trust 
us with all powers to save the Kepublic. Already, in the 
first debate on the law, he had insisted against any 
adjournment ; he had argued it clause by clause, and, 
with a species of closure by menace, he had dictated it to 
the Parliament ; he had passed it in one sitting. He 
made the law, and he only. Why did he make it ? 

I will hazard this paradox. It cannot be proved, it 
is but an hypothesis, but it is the only hypothesis that 
explains all. He made it in order to impose the pure 
Republic upon the nation, and connected with that 
idea was a determination to end the Terror. Could a 
gross accentuation of the Terror tend to close it — save by 
extermination ? It was not thus the problem presented 
itself to him. His chief antagonists, the men whom he 
thought to stand between him and the goal of the 
Revolution, were the irresponsible proconsuls in the 
provinces. He demanded in this law a sword against 
them. Some time before,^ in a note written in his 
own hand, and signed first by him, the committee had 
recalled Fouch^ from Lyons. At the end of May he, 
almost of his own initiative, had arrested Thereza 
Cabarrus, the mistress of Tallien.^ He aimed directly at 

^ There is an MS. note of Robespierre's on Bourdon : " This man goes 
about with the gait and habit of a criminal, seeking the opportunities of 
crime." 

2 On the 7th of Germinal (the 27th March). 

* This warrant of arrest (of the 22nd May) was the most direct cause 
of the fall of Robespierre. It is a curious document, very characteristic 



312 ROBESPIERRE 

Tallien himself, who had spilt so much blood at Bor- 
deaux, and had taken suddenly in that unhappy city to 
lounging across drawing-rooms, and to posing as the 
southern voluptuary ; an actor. 

There was a kind of man (there were but six or seven 
of them in the Convention) particularly odious to Robes- 
pierre, and he was of such a nature that what was odious 
to him he believed of necessity to be odious also to God, 
to Nature, and to the Republic. This kind of man, who 
had taken advantage of the Revolution in order to excel 
in licence, who was the very antithesis of Rousseauan 
stoicism, who was commonly an atheist, always an evil 
liver, seemed in the eyes of Robespierre to be a cancer in 
the State. If it be asked why, to achieve his final pur- 
pose to destroy these men and to impose upon the nation 
the Republic that haunted him he had recourse to 
such a venture as the law of the 22 nd of Prairial, the 
answer is that men so utterly out of touch with reality as 
he was can imagine no strength save the crude absolute 
of power. Just as some modern men in politics will 
conduct a war under the impression that victory means 
something they have seen on a stage, a thing of one 
blow, so this insufficient intellect thought that mastery 
did not exist unless it were final and one. And this it 
thought because it had in no way the genius of mastery. 

That he had it in his mind to stop the Terror, to 

of his habits ; it is written out in his own hand ; he has signed it first 
at the top, then he has scratched out his first signature and signed it 
again at the bottom. There are no capital letters, not even to the word 
" Kepublic " ; and as nothing from his hand could be written without a re- 
casting of style, there is even in these few lines an erasure. Therezia 
Cabarrus was a Spaniard, not yet of age. Six years before, on the eve of 
the Revolution, she had been married as a girl of fifteen to the Marquis 
de Fontenay, who divorced her. Tallien married her in the winter after 
Thermidor (26th December, '94), and divorced her in 1802. In 1S05 she 
married the Prince de Chimay, and died long after in his castle at Chimay, 
still bearing that unlucky title. She had borne seven children to these 
three husbands, and four others besides. 



THE FOUR MONTHS 313 

appear as a kind of saviour of France, we know, not from 
the calculated accounts made long after the reaction 
(they are valueless), but from the natural outbursts of 
Thermidor. 

Barrere, just after the death of Robespierre, let 
loose a sentence that betrays it all : " He perished 
because he would have stopped the great career of the 
Revolution." Billaud, a fanatic not to be trusted with 
the sword, violent, worthy of death, therefore a man 
whose expletives must necessarily be honest, poured out, 
as will be seen in a moment, a torrent of invective 
against Robespierre in the debates that determined his 
fall ; and all this invective turns upon Robespierre's 
attempting to stop the Terror. I repeat, it cannot be 
absolutely proved but it is the only workable hypothesis, 
that the law of the i oth of June was the wild grasping at 
the full externals of power by a man who did not under- 
stand the nature of power ; and he so grasped at it because 
he believed that all France was behind him, and that 
he would be able quickly and without debate to end the 
welter of persecution and to save society ; there was then 
something in this unsoldierly man of the Csesarist, and 
every Caesar has felt something in common with him — 
none more than Napoleon. 

Now, from the law of the 22 nd of Prairial, and from 
the direct determination of Robespierre to wipe out the 
few remaining men that seemed to obstruct the advent 
of a settled and an ideal state, there sprang two things. 

The committee found itself finally omnipotent ; that 
was the first thing. 

The second thing was that the men whom he so openly 
aimed at, entered, as their nature was, into a conspiracy. 

To the committee, of which Robespierre erroneously 
imagined himself to be the master, which he thought to 
be, like the Convention, awed by the memory of his awful 
popularity, the law of the 22nd of Prairial was what a 



314 ROBESPIERRE 

gift of money is to a man abeady wealthy and avaricious 
and deep in speculations. Carnot (insisting upon tho 
feeding of the armies and believing that the Terror alone 
could do it) ; Barrere (determined to keep in existence the 
organ of government with which he alone was acquainted, 
and of which he was the mouthpiece) ; Prieur (considering 
the breakdown of his foreign policy which would follow 
too close an examination of the committee by the Conven- 
tion) — they and all the rest of the committee saw in the 
Terror a means of government which appeared to be fail- 
ing them as the victories increased. They seized upon 
the law of Prairial as an opportune completion of their 
power ; they used it as Robespierre never wished it to be 
used, and when he asked them immediately after the 
passing of the decree for the heads of the last few men 
that remained (as he believed) the enemies of his system, 
he was bluntly refused. The Committee was weary of 
his affectation of control ; it was determined to use for 
its own purposes the law which he had made; to cen- 
tralise the action of the government and especially its 
power of sudden stroke and punishment in Paris. In 
seven weeks it had put to death nearly 1400 men. 

From this sprang the obscure quarrel upon which, 
in the face of all the contradictions and secrecy which 
throw a veil over the debates of the Ten, historians can 
never be secure judges. Only one thing is certain that 
he attended the meetings of the Committee with reluct- 
ance, that he argued against their most fundamental deci- 
sions, that he threatened them with an obstinacy that can 
only have been based upon a false judgment of his power 
of control, and that, in fine, he grew increasingly irksome 
to the handful of men who were still governing France. 

The lower committee, which controlled the police of 
the city, was already uniformly hostile to him. Vadier 
got up in the most ridiculous fashion the case of the old 
mystic Catherine Theot ; he presented his report to the 



THE FOUR MONTHS 315 

Convention in such a fashion that he appeared to be 
defending Robespierre, while in every phrase the old 
buffoon knew that he was wounding him and bleeding 
him ; in every phrase he ridiculed religion, and Robes- 
pierre in the chair sat silent and disgusted. This was 
less than a week after the passing of the law. 

Robespierre's answer to that insult was a kind of revolt 
against the committees. He came indeed regularly enough, 
he signed before the middle of Messidor six important docu- 
ments with his colleagues ; on the 1 6th of that month he 
wrote out a letter to the representatives on mission in the 
name of the Committee; on the 28th he even took the 
initiative in recalling Dubois Crance from Rennes, and on 
the same. day he was glad enough to sign an order for the 
release of thirty-three prisoners whom Rousselin had ar- 
rested in Troyes. It cannot be said that he absented him- 
self in body from the committee. It has been proved that 
between the law of the 22nd Prairial to the day of his 
fall in Thermidor, he was actually absent from the com- 
mittee but six times, just once a week ; but though he 
was not physically absent he was morally separated from 
the majority of his colleagues. He only came to inter- 
fere with their principal work. Of all the lists of the 
hundreds that were sent in that terrible summer to the 
revolutionary tribunal, he signed after the beginning of 
Messidor but one, and that the least important, and when 
he came to defend himself in his long final speech to the 
Convention on the day before his fall, he said in so many 
words : — 

" I will not make public the debates of the Com- 
mittee ; I will confine myself to saying that for the last 
six weeks the force of calumny has made it impossible 
for me to arrest the torrent of evil deeds. ... I far 
prefer my character of a representative of the people 
to that of a member of the Committee of Public 
Safety." 



3i6 ROBESPIERRE 

In the same speech he said (and he was perfectly 
sincere in it) : — 

" I was but for a few days at the head of the 
poHce because one of my colleagues was absent; I was 
concerned with the arrest of perhaps some thirty men, 
and yet that little time has given an excuse for telling 
every man that if he is imprisoned it is I who am to 
blame." 

The suspicion with which he was haunted was not 
wholly just. There was indeed a definite conspiracy 
already formed against him, but that conspiracy was 
extraneous to the Committee. It was Fouche and Tallien 
and their friends, the lost men of the Convention, men 
utterly inferior to the Government, that were weaving the 
conspiracy. The Committee, exasperated at his pride, 
his silence, his opposition, his refusal to accept their 
policy, were yet not actively dragging him down ; it was 
because his name had become identified with that of the 
Revolution, because he had yielded to the great tempta- 
tion of the winter, that now this nemesis had come. He 
could not escape from the accusation that he was him- 
self the Republic, himself the Government, and himself 
the Terror. He had chosen to pass for the Revolution 
incarnate ; now that, with the victories certain and the 
nation safe, the Terror was becoming odious, he was com- 
pelled still to pass, in spite of himself, for the incarnate 
Terror, and in all the cabinets of Europe, in all the 
prisons throughout France, Robespierre was the name of 
that intolerable anachronism.'^ 

Caught in this trap, which his own jdelding to 
ambition had laid, Robespierre advanced to meet his fate 
by falling into every error that could ruin him. 

^ When Madame Duplay was thrust into the prison on the 9th of Ther- 
midor (a prison from which she never came out alive), one of the prisoners 
asked who she was, and another answered, " She was the Queen, but now 
she is dethroned." On this string even the jailers harped as the rest of 
her household came iu under arrest. 



THE FOUR MONTHS 317 

I have described in an earlier portion of this book 
how by nature he avoided the mention of personal 
names. How, in the great quarrel with the Girondins 
upon the question of war, for once that he said the 
word " Brissot " or " Koland " his opponents spoke his 
own name ten times. 

On his lips there were always such phrases as, "a 
certain faction," " men of such and such a kind," and 
so forth; it was mania for generalities upon which he 
could pursue his mania for deduction. 

I have described also how, when he merged into the 
new violence of Paris after the loth of August, he for a 
moment became more direct and how there was apparent 
in him a permanent bitterness and a kind of venom which 
pricked his opponents to fury. He was then upon a 
rising tide; the people demanded government; he was 
one of the conquerors of the Gironde. 

Now that he was losing, this feature reappeared. In 
the beginning of the great quarrel in which he fell he 
had attempted to make a general description which his 
audience were intended to apply to Bourdon. Bourdon 
rose up in a fury, crying, " It has been pointed out pretty 
clearly in this speech that I am a scoundrel." Robes- 
pierre, losing control, had answered from the tribune : 
" In the name of the country, let these interruptions 
cease. It is an awful peril for any man to name himself. 
If he is determined to recognise himself in the portrait I 
have drawn, in the portrait which my duty has compelled 
me to draw, it is not in my power to prevent him." From 
several quarters of the hall there had arisen the cry of 
" Names ! " Robespierre had only answered, " I will 
name them when I must." ^ 

That was in Prairial. In Messidor, as his danger 
drew nearer, he broke out into direct invective. He 

^ In the debate on the law of Prairial see Moniteur of the 26th 
Frairial, the year II. 



31 8 ROBESPIERRE 

attacked Fouclie on the 1 1 th of July, and when Fouch^ 
replied on the 14th, the day of the great anniversary, 
Robespierre met him with further direct accusations. 

" What is this fear which troubles him ? Is it perhaps 
the eyes of the people ? Is it perhaps that his wretched 
face proves him too clearly the author of a crime ? " 
And he ended with the straight words : " These men have 
put patriots in prison because they dared to break silence. 
That is the crime of which I accuse Fouch^." 

But though he had only six or seven in mind, he 
that had passed by his own fault for the Master of the 
Terror seemed to be accusing every one. He made the 
Convention tremble and the Jacobins. And who shall 
say that he took no pleasure in such a simulacrum of 
power ? Yet even that had left him. The great victories 
in the north-east had thrown the populace into an ardent 
need for repose. It was like the craving for sleep that falls 
upon men who have overstrained their powers in a bout 
of feverish games. And the centre of all authority, the 
only immediate possessors of material power, the Com- 
mittee, were against him. The seven workers were 
leaving him ostracised, and were drawing a sharp line 
between themselves and his two friends, Couthon and 
St. Just. 

To these difficulties he added yet another. It will 
be remarked that men in their difficulties, and especially 
before their death, often return to the influences of their 
childhood. In such crises the stirp of the man re- 
appears. So Robespierre, that had always preached 
himself, seen himself, and, if the phrase be not unjust, 
unconsciously worshipped himself, now in these last days 
returned to the self-pity of that mournful and isolated 
time of his orphanage. He found all power leaving him, 
and thought himself a victim. Perhaps he still believed 
that the people of Paris in some vague way would 
support him. He was wrong. There was but one thing 



THE FOUR MONTHS 319 

ready to support Mm, the Commune of Paris, and that 
Commune did not represent the people at all. He had 
himself thrust in upon it his own supporters. 

Down in Nantes a young representative on mission ^ 
intercepted two letters which Fouche had written to his 
sister. They spoke plainly of the coming attack, "in 
which it was hoped that all would turn for the best." 
He sent them back to the Committee of Public Safety. 
Perhaps by their enmity, perhaps by this young man's 
tardiness, the letter did not come until Robespierre had 
fallen. 

It was on the 5 th of Thermidor that he first received 
a clear warning. The two committees united to send 
him a note summoning him as though he were a power 
outside them and inimical to them : it was a kind of 
writ. He came to them and replied to their ques- 
tions ; but a trial of that kind where a man suspected of 
betraying or attacking the body he belongs to is called up 
before his colleagues, goes as it were by default ; it is a 
verdict, and condemns of itself. He met the supreme 
moment of danger in a manner that was a summary of 
his whole life ; he fell back upon his pen. 

There was lying on the little plain table of his room a 
mass of sheets which he had been working, modelling, re- 
casting during all these weeks of increasing uncertainty.^ 
He turned to them and perfected his plea. For two 
days he wrote unceasingly. Around him, inspiring him 
a little in his defence, was the severity that had 
been the furniture of his strict simplicity; the plain 
small bed ; ^ the little deal shelf where his few books, his 

^ A person of the name of Bo. 

2 That is a mere conjecture, but it is Michelet's, and surely sound. 
No one can look at those innumerable collections or savour the close 
style and great length of the speech without seeing in it a labour of much 
more than the last two days. 

^ Those who care for detail may be curious to learn that the curtains 
of this bed were made out of an old blue dress of Madame Duplay's. 



320 ROBESPIERRE 

Kousseau, Corneille and Pascal stood togetlier ; the straw- 
bottomed chair. He wrote and wrote with the noise of 
the carpenters beneath his window, and, in the street be- 
yond the archway of the courtyard, the noise of the city 
in summer, and, twice, the cries and terror of the tumbrils. 
It was the shrine or cell whence he had seen all the 
height of the Revolution go by, and in which he had 
moulded a hundred speeches that had expressed, but not 
determined, its course. It was the room in which he 
had sat, certain of his own mind when he told them to 
shut the outer door upon the passage of Louis to his 
death : in which, disturbed but evilly tenacious he had 
heard come into him the death-song of Danton. Now he 
himself was here parrying off the end, he thought, with 
scratched and repeated phrases. 

He left his room but twice in these forty-eight hours. 
Once to walk out at sunset for the last time with 
Eleanor — his dog beside him. Again in the same 
evening to make a vague, troubling speech at the 
Jacobins on the persecution that virtue was suffering; 
that he was suffering. It roused the club, still his chief 
weapon, to present a petition to the Convention ; and that 
petition seemed yet another menace to the Parliament. 

On the evening of the 7 th his work was done. It is 
to be noted that he never doubted of its success ; he was 
more confident at the close of his labour than he had 
been in all the growing peril of Messidor. 

In the last hours of daylight, in the warmth and splen- 
dour of a weather that was but just beginning to intro- 
duce the oppression of storm, he left his completed phrases 
and, taking the boy, Nicholas Duplay,^ that had sometimes 
been his secretary, walked up and out to the hill of 
Chaillot, There he sauntered, talking gently of common 

^ They called him "Nicholas of the wooden leg" because he had lost 
a limb at Valmy. He was the nephew of Duplay. He lived on well into 
our century and had a son, who became a doctor of some repute and has 
preserved this little scene. 



THE FOUR MONTHS 321 

things, quietly gay, catching at the midges with his 
hand, permitting himself at moments reverie. The next 
day he read his speech to the Convention. 

There is no need to detail the character or to quote 
the many phrases of his defence. Noted on its margin 
were names he did pronounce, its character lay in an 
opening sentence. 

" I shall make it my task to expose the abuses that 
are about to ruin the country, and that your honesty 
alone can correct. If I speak of the persecution to which 
I have been latterly subject, count it no crime in me, the 
cause is your cause also. ... I come here to make no 
accusations : that province is in the hands of others." 

In a famous and dignified passage that has a quality 
parallel to but lower than nobility, he asks what kind of 
tyranny that can have been in him which made all the 
tyrants of Europe find him their chief enemy ; he pro- 
phesies clearly and with a separate marked passage the 
advent of a military despotism upon his ruin, and, since it 
might come to death, he passed upon death, upon his own 
death, his final judgment : — 

" Believe me, it is not an eternal sleep. I would have 
it written upon all graves that they are the entry to im- 
mortality." 

It was not upon the Convention, uncertain, reading 
into his words the menace he may have intended to 
convey, that he depended. He depended in the last 
resort upon the great society that had so long been the 
mistress of the Kevolution, and over which his name still 
stood like a command. That evening he re-read his 
appeal in the crowded chapel and before the high passion 
of the Jacobins. They heard him with such zeal that he 
seemed to them in his lonely tribune the Reform living, 
the Reform on the threshold of death. He ended with : — 

" This that you have heard is my testament and my 
wiU." 

X 



322 ROBESPIERRE 

Then lie lifted off the spectacles that spoilt his gaze, 
showed his sharply featured face silhouetted bj the 
candles before it, and, leaving his manuscript, said to 
them all : — 

" If I must drink the hemlock, I will drink it." 

David of the swollen jaw cried out to him loudly 
from the throng and darkness of the nave : — 

" I will drink it with you." 

Frenzy and something lyrical caught the press of the 
Jacobins and ran, a flame, along the hall. Billaud- 
Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, chiefly enemies; Dubarran, 
Duval, lesser men, were listening there also ; they were 
recognised. One at least was struck at with a poniard ; 
they were pushed through the doors of the chapel out 
into the night, and behind them the club, enthusiastic 
and possessed with a presentiment, feeling that their 
vision and this man of theirs would end together and 
that the turn of the battle had come, cried that a 2nd 
of June was needed, that Paris should march upon the 
Parliament, that one last stroke of the scythe would clear 
the field. 

As the fugitives fled angrily from the arches of the 
courtyard they heard the air full not only of clamour, 
but of rising and conquering music. The JacobkiS sang 
of the Republic, and with the falling of their chorus their 
power passed out into the void and was extinguished. 

So the Jacobins ended their song. But three spirits 
that night, the three fates of Robespierre, kept watch 
till the morning — the Conspiracy, the Commune, the 
Committee. The Committee was the foremost. The 
Commune thought itself the immediate power. The 
Conspiracy was the one thing active and determined, 
the one thing that understood how far this mixture of 
tyranny, special policy, symbolism, and madness had 



THE FOUR MONTHS 323 

overshot tlie mark ; how much France and the Conven- 
tion demanded rest. 

The Conspiracy. — And none of the three slept. 
The Conspirators went from one to another ; they threw 
away at last their shreds of theory, their mask of prin- 
ciple, for the mere sake of existence. They put before 
themselves the simplest of objects: to live and to kill 
what would have stopped their living ; for they were 
livers all of the worst, plunged up to the neck in sense, 
and half ruined in their earliest youth by the excess of 
living. Yet they grasped hold of life with the blind 
tenacity of panic, because life was all they knew. God 
gave it them, and the name of Fouche is enough to show 
the material they were permitted to use. 

All that night, then, in the defence of their lives, they 
worked with every lever and upon every side to upset the 
last strong ruins of Robespierre's power. They approached 
the isolated politicians of the Mountain and plied them with 
what could not be denied, the name of master that was 
given to Robespierre ; his latter dissociation from the strict 
republicans, and his leaning to the Right. The Moun- 
tain gave them some disdainful pledge — it did not seem 
enough. 

They passed, did these men whom all in common 
despised, but in whom all in common saw a kind of 
necessary vengeance, to the silent relics of what had 
been the moderates : to Boissy d'Anglas with his great 
name, to Si^yes with his memories — perhaps to Gregoire. 
To these they promised (with how little belief in their 
word and with what unconscious power of prophecy !) 
the close of the Terror. None knew better than the 
Conspirators that their own deaths would be the surest 
opportunity for the entry of civil law and of amnesties. 
But the Conspirators played here upon the surest chord. 
So identified was the Terror with extreme theory and 
with the person of Robespierre that it seemed as though 



324 ROBESPIERRE 

to end tlie one was to end the other too ; and the man 
was easiest ended. It was slowly, and in the painful 
decision of the sleepless morning, that the Right thus 
consented to vote against the man who had so long stood 
between them and the guillotine. 

The Commune. — There was also in Paris that second 
force which has run through these pages like a chord. 
Paris had once felt her mastery, had organised her 
authority, and had, with the proud ^responsibility which 
belongs alike to kings and aristocracies, enforced herself 
upon the inaction of the nation. The municipal govern- 
ment, framed in the moment of most extreme danger, 
and depending upon the theory of the city's leadership, 
remained ; and the men that composed it still thought 
themselves in some legitimate way the masters. If such 
and such were arraigned, the Commune were the justice 
of France to judge their treason; if the national effort 
weakened they were the ordained and elected force to 
restore its vigour. They did not know how much they 
had lost France ; they had lost Fa^^is itself, these last 
abandoned extremists whom a receding tide had left 
stranded, whom the sections would not follow, and whose 
command now seemed extravagant. Yet in good faith 
and even with confidence they also kept vigil. If 
Robespierre fell, there fell with him all their creed of 
justice. 

Hanriot, on the 2nd of June, had achieved one revolu- 
tion, he was sure he could achieve another, and in the 
night he sent out his orders to the sections and their 
cannon. We shall see how they hesitated and doubted 
and did little. 

France, for which Paris exists, had no more need 
of Paris. Payan, however, pure Robespierrean, not even 
Parisian, worked hard at the head of the municipality 
for Robespierre. Haughty and a little flippant, that 
young man next day entered the den of the Committee 



THE FOUR MONTHS 325 

at noon and escaped safe. He also did not sleep, all 
tlie night he summoned, organised, and watched. 

If the Commune had still been the Commune all the 
armed men would have stirred in the night and out of 
the mouths of twenty little narrow streets the pikes and 
the cannon would have poured upon the Place de Grfeve 
till the whole great square would not have held them. 
It would have been once more the 2nd of June or the 
I oth of August ; Paris made united by a word of com- 
mand or authority. But Authority was wanting. The 
General Will that was known as Authority was silent. A 
lesser authority remained, the Parliament ; and by Autho- 
rity the French people live. Kobespierre (whom Hanriot 
and all the Commune sat up that night to defend) dared 
not defy Authority. He perished because he could not 
sign an order outside law and separate from the general 
mandate. 

The Committee. — Up in a high room of the Pavilion de 
Flore, the southern pavilion of the palace, five of the Com- 
mittee sat in silence round the great table. The despotic 
council that the Kepublic had imposed upon herself with 
a marvellous instinct to her own salvation was at the 
extreme verge of its power, and the night, that had 
inspired their secrecy and intensity for many months of 
doubtful struggle and that had nourished their continued 
silence, still presided like a steadfast mistress over their 
end. The battle was over, and it is fitting to regard 
those few hours of darkness as the close of a great 
action in which, take them for all in all, these ill- 
assorted men had saved the nation. 

Nor was their passing watched by the overhanging 
night alone. Beneath their windows, the wall of the 
Tuileries — a gulf over Paris, a cliff, below which the 
Seine ran low and meagre in the great heat, up which 
there surged at this late hour the noise of the flood of 
reaction, confused, eddying, rising — was the abrupt em- 



326 ROBESPIERRE 

blem of tlie suddenness of this end. The relaxation 
of inhuman heroisms, inflexible cruelties, mad judg- 
ments, and unattainable visions was come, and with 
the loosening of the hard revolutionary grasp there 
snapped at once the bond that had held the strange 
fabric rigid. Next day all the new France was to lapse 
into turmoil. But the confusion of waters was the 
launching of a ship, and years after the Modern State, 
that men thought lost, was to ride even and secure. 

The five were Barr^re, a Gascon, uncertain, waiting ; 
the three workers — Carnot, the soldier; the lawyers 
Prieur and Lindet — and lastly, St. Just. But these five, 
of whom certain historians in the light of what was to 
come, would make two camps, were by no means so 
clearly divided. A kind of suspicion made the silence 
difficult, and sharpened the ear of each to the scratch- 
ing of the quills. Yet no one had spoken the word, or 
even harboured it. Barrere was still unsure, Carnot still 
absorbed in orders. They knew Robespierre that had 
irked and half deserted them, to be in jeopardy. St. Just 
they knew to be his shield-bearer. Yet one thing only 
concerned the workers, to be allowed to continue their work; 
and one thing only concerned Barrere, to be allowed to 
remain the voice and the official of what was now with- 
out question the sole government. Nevertheless Robes- 
pierre's continued power would have widened the gulf 
between him and the Committee, while if the balance 
trembled ever so little against him, that little would 
prove enough to throw Carnot and all Carnot's following 
into the opposing scale, and the Committees would 
become the executioners of the triumvirs. As yet that 
had not come, and the five still worked in silence. 

They had so sat for about an hour with barely a word 
between them, save when one or the other passed round 
an order for the rest to sign. 

It was eleven o'clock, the Jacobins had just poured 



THE FOUR MONTHS — - 327 

their angry flood into the street, chasing Billaud and 
Collot before them. This last ran, beside himself, 
down the dark lane of the stables, followed by his 
clique, and gathering round him as he passed into the 
palace some few of the lower committee. They sprang, 
full of their defeat and insults, up the great staircase of 
the pavilion, and calling and reviling confusedly, broke 
into the room where the five were sitting. 

Collot d'Herbois, ill-balanced, with his tortured 
face of anger and shame, threw out openly against St. 
Just all those words which had worked under the surface 
of so many minds for so long. 

" They, the Committee, the whole Republic was op- 
pressed. They could not breathe. There was a dictator- 
ship, and it was even insolent. Here to-night in the 
crisis of their fortunes it had left them face to face with 
a child. Why was not Robespierre there to answer him ? 
Where was Couthon ? They were left with a boy, St. Just, 
to deal with ; they were insulted with a child." 

He would repeat the word, " a child, a child." It 
was the best insult he could find to pay back in their 
own coin the stings of the Jacobins. 

St. Just's great beauty, his stature, his youth, his 
birth, were a power to him. He had risen when his 
enemies stumbled in, and had asked coldly, as though it 
was small talk, " what was on at the Jacobins." During 
the confused rush of words that poured from Collot, 
mingled with the interjections of the rest, St. Just 
remained standing. Then he sat down, as quietly, and 
took paper to draft what he had determined to say to the 
Convention in the morning, leaving on the other side of 
the table a small erect crowd that still cried and menaced, 
and that the remaining members of the great Committee 
half supported, half soothed into silence. 

What scene was that which occupied the remaining 
hours ? The accounts are varied, the details confused. 



32 8 ROBESPIERRE 

It was barely half-an-hour before midnigbt wben St. Just 
sat down to write ; bis bead beld, as be bad always beld 
it, stiffly in tbe balf-military stock tbat recalled tbe 
eastern victories. But midnigbt came early in tbe scene. 
For bours tbere were outbursts of recrimination on tbe 
part of tbe new-comers, unanswered or bardly answered 
by tbe young man before tbem, witb bis eyes downward : 
witb tbe fine oval of bis face fixed like steel enamelled. 

And in tbose bours tbe workers still worked, Barrfere 
still temporised. Perbaps some few of tbe interrupters 
slept. St. Just wrote on, drawing up tbat requisitory 
wbicb, bad it been pronounced, migbt bave saved bis 
friend. 

An uneasy dawn, tbe long early dawn of midsummer 
began to mark tbe tall curtains of tbe room and to sbow 
reality sbivering. Tbe twin candelabra burnt paler, and 
tbe details of tbe bigb cornice, tbe regal details tbat tbe 
committee bad inberited, appeared against tbe painted 
ceiling. Tbe polished woodwork of tbe parquetted floor 
sbone in tbe balf ligbt. Tbe workers still worked on, 
Barrere still besitated — indeed, be bardly understood tbe 
quarrel. Tbe wbole of tbe second committee bad filtered 
in, and sprawled balf asleep, balf awake in tbe midst of 
tbeir masters. The fool Lecointre, in an agony, thinking 
all depended upon immediate action, had armed himself to 
tbe teeth, stuffed into bis trousers pockets two pistols witb 
miniature bayonets, tbe points of wbicb poked outwards, 
and bad been hammering at tbe door. Not be but bis 
note bad at last been admitted. It merely urged tbem to 
arrest Hanriot and check the Commune — a plan which 
eight bours more did not suffice to argue out or determine. 
Meanwhile the one representative of Robespierre still sat 
impassible as the ligbt grew ; be scratched out, rewrote 
and moulded bis thesis of defence. Throughout this work 
be lifted bis bead from time to time to speak in some 
commonplace phrase or other to bis colleagues. He 



THE FOUR MONTHS 329 

avoided any general enmity. Wlien he addressed the 
two committees as a whole it was to assure them that 
the Committee of Public Safety should see his work 
before he read it to the Convention, nor could even an 
eye-witness have known that those four colleagues of 
his were ready for his death ; and for that of Couthon, 
absent, and for that of Robespierre. 

When it had been for some time fully light, so that 
the candles were blown out and the faces of these sleep- 
less men, though haggard and unnatural, turned to the 
new task of a new day, St. Just rose at last, and took 
his hat and his papers gravely, and passed out from the 
room, to which he returned so soon outlawed, a prisoner, 
and maimed. Without, it smelt of morning. But the 
morning was not sunlit. There was no promise in the 
deserted streets, nor any lifting of the heart. The sky 
was ominous and veiled, the air charged with the silent 
approach of storm as he passed up the narrow streets to 
his home. 

Robespierre, back under his own roof, thought to 
have found security. 

That short summer night, in which his fate was 
gathering, as the thunder did, weighed upon him with no 
incumbent menace, and conveyed, to him, no prefatory 
silence of doom. His mind, still absorbed in those 
abstractions whose matter was little beyond the image 
of himself, remained equable and closed as ever to the 
portents that were already troubling so many between 
the daylight and the daylight. The influence of the time, 
the close air and the dark sky, the vision of the crowded 
prisons, the indefinable unquiet rumour that passes 
through great cities as they await a climax in their 
history, left undisturbed that unnatural ease of his which 
had earned him falsely the titles of greater men. Yet 
he was the victim upon whom this tragedy converged. 
The general face of nature, whose features men more 



330 ROBESPIERRE 

ordinary and more human compreliend by a generous 
instinct, was fixed upon him with a gaze that might have 
moved him to heroie exclamation or to frenzy, had not 
his soul been incapable alike of enthusiasms or of terrors. 
It was upon him — if one may personify the physical 
character of a time — that this July night had fixed the 
level eyes of necessity. He did not feel the gaze ; he was 
able to repose. The scene at the Jacobins which had 
drawn such a cry from David and will ever remain a 
mark in the history of his country, had not the power to 
change the course of those habits which best reflected his 
interior life. He continued the exact care of his clothing 
and his unalterable determination to purge mankind of 
evil and to restore it to its origins of simplicity. He slept 
soundly his short and easy sleep, rose at his accustomed 
hour, dressed with minute care and with the touch of 
over-neatness that had distinguished him from the deli- 
rious crowd, and put on for the encounter of that day 
the light-blue coat which had become his habitual wear 
and which he had first used six weeks before in the feast 
of the Supreme Being. 

As he left the house Duplay came to the door with 
him, anxious and full of warning : a generous friend. 
Robespierre answered him with the thin but almost 
genial smile that was the constant mark of his assurance. 
" The Convention was honest in the main — all great 
masses of men were honest." 

So he went out into the stiflinsf air and under the 
grey sky with the restrained and decent step that all men 
had recognised so long, crossed the street and turned 
down the narrow lane to the palace, leaving behind him 
the unsatisfied foreboding of a simple and loyal man, 
humbler, but much wiser than himself; for he never 
came home, and he never slept again. 



CHAPTER X 
«TH E RMI D O R" 

It was close on noon. The Convention had met, troubled 
under a troubled sky, and busy with an instinct that will 
sometimes permeate great assemblies ; the vague anxiety 
that, for all their hesitation, fate is using them for a 
certain work. Each member of those obscure hundreds 
felt himself helpless and in doubt, but knew how that 
very helplessness would leave him at the mercy of such 
orgasms as seize suddenly upon multitudes; for at this 
late hour men had learnt the fallacy of corporate action 
and had discovered that a number gathered is far more 
than the sum of its individuals, and that there broods 
over it, ready to drive it to madness, or heroism, or panic, 
or superhuman resolutions, the spirit of the Horde. 

Two little groups present there knew very well at 
what they aimed, yet, though they were direct opposing 
enemies, their aims were not strictly contrasted. It was 
the arena, the moment and necessity for victory, that 
drew them up against one another, and the necessity for 
an issue that made the life of Robespierre the stake 
of the game. 

The first group were those few conspirators to whom 
the rule of a Puritan and the pressure of one man had 
grown from the odious to the intolerable. They were 
indeed mere spokesmen, and it is a character never to be 
forgotten in the history of Thermidor that by a mixture 
of confusion and disgust the solid opposition to Maxi- 
milian abandoned its expression to men whose character 



332 ROBESPIERRE 

none valued and whose violence and irresponsibility left 
them free for every adventure. They were a voice, were 
Fr^ron, Tallien, Fouch^ and the rest, but they spoke (if 
they succeeded) for a definitely formed opinion. They 
spoke for the irritation of the working members of the 
great Committee ; for the jealousy and exasperation of 
a lower committee that was almost unanimous; for 
the fears of many extremists returned from their work 
in the provinces and dreading vengeance. All these 
(and there might be added to them many soldiers, 
diplomats, administrators), were fighting the final success 
of a regime in which an extreme political idealism and 
the fanaticism for its tribune might destroy the whole 
accomplished work of one, the pleasures of another, the 
life of a third. 

Against the conspirators there were ranged a yet 
smaller body, the friends of Robespierre but the friends of 
much more. Couthon, St. Just, Lebas, Payan felt a net 
drawing round their Perfect State just at its rising. The 
practical and the judicious — compromise — perhaps re- 
action — were appearing on the horizons of their battle- 
field and converging upon their great experiment. A 
way had to be cut through such enemies and their 
scheme saved to the world. For the Perfect State had 
from a goal become a present vision to these men and 
their adherents ; in them, by a rare political phenomenon, 
success had not dissipated the ideal nor turned it into a 
memory, but had raised it above earth and given it 
the strength and reality of a creed. They had passed 
from affirmation to prophecy, and where the enthusiasm 
of others had fed upon the war and the defence and had 
fallen with the victories, theirs only grew the more lyrical 
and exalted from what they conceived to be the military 
security of then new world. 

Of these men the most determined, the sanest and 
yet the most inspired was St. Just. Very young and 



"THERMIDOR" 333 

violent as he was, he yet had the broadest view and the 
largest potentialities — he was not ignorant of humour ; he 
could bargain. He had formed of the social spirit that 
the Jacobins were occupied in creating a fuller and a more 
human conception than had any of his circle. He would 
have given it a religion, he would have organised a 
legislature that would be popular without anarchy, and an 
executive that would have remained impersonal and re- 
presentative without any exaggeration of numbers. I 
would not convey that he was of a calibre to guide 
the Republic nor pretend that such a flame could, in 
ordinary times, have done more than consume ; had (for 
example) Robespierre achieved his plan, the boy St. Just 
would surely have failed where the man Carnot succeeded. 
But I mean that among those enthusiasts of which he 
formed a member, it was he who most thoroughly entered 
into men, whose dream would have made the better poem 
or picture, whose art was the firmest. He had been a 
soldier, he had seen the common man at work in the 
trenches by Charleroi, he had touched earth, and at the 
head of charges he had had breathed into him that 
vast spirit of an army which magnifies every sense in 
man. If Robespierre had been his attachment, yet he 
was less of an idol to him than to the crowd; what 
he came to defend that day was His Republic, and in the 
defence of it he was even willing to depose his friend 
a little, by a step or two, from the throne. 

This young man stood at the foot of the tribune 
as the minutes were read and the correspondence opened. 
When the formalities were over he turned to CoUot 
d'Herbois in the chair and claimed to open the debate. 
Collot d'Herbois, his enemy and his antagonist of the 
night before, caught no other voice, and St. Just stood 
at the desk and spread before him the report which he had 
prepared during the last session of the committee. 

The high, glazed roof, which alone gave light to the 



334 ROBESPIERRE 

Theatre of the Tuileries, and which emphasised the portent 
of the Convention with gloom, showed his long hair and 
straight figure conspicuous in the centre of the rings of 
hearers. So, his head haloed, his mouth and lower face 
in darkness, he pitched his clear voice to that level of 
reason and pleading which he had determined to be 
necessary for the occasion ; he abandoned gesture, and in 
his first words struck the tone of argument and debate. 
Had the whole of his defence been heard as we can read 
it now, balanced, careful, appealing to all that the Con- 
vention most valued and ready for every suggestion, his 
cause would certainly have won. For that document has 
nothing in it which the Republic did not desire. Even 
to-day there appears in it just the remedy for the block 
into which things had jostled. He would have consoli- 
dated the great Committee (whose divisions were the 
prime source of the whole evil) by making at least six sig- 
natures necessary to every act. Six would leave him and 
his friend and Couthon still powerless if the Committee 
were against them. He would have restrained the Terror, 
especially in the provinces. And the gist of all this 
labour, the wisest as it was the most ineffectual of 
his life, lay in a resolution by which the Convention 
should establish checks upon the arbitrary power of the 
executive. 

I say, if this speech had been read fully, in the tone 
and with the spirit he brought to it, his cause would 
have been gained. He had not completed the first phrase, 
declaring his opposition to every faction, when the cry 
was heard which began the fall of Robespierre. 

Tallien, from a little knot near the door, called out to 
him, " Tear down the veil ! " 

This man and his associates were neither secure nor 
able. It will be seen how, as the afternoon proceeded, 
they nearly blundered into failure, as they had all but 
blundered into it the day before. The mad inconsequence 



"THERMIDOR" 335 

of Fr^ron, the base over-cunning of Fouch^ the vulgar 
melodrama of Tallien himself, were qualities ill fitted to 
conspirators. And yet in the end they blundered, not 
into failure, but upon the very object they had set before 
themselves, and the beginning of their success was this 
cry of Tallien's, which was meant to be nothing but an 
interruption, but which happened to cut short at its 
outset the careful speech that would have saved the life 
and but half diminished the influence of Robespierre. 

The varied scene that followed can never be under- 
stood by those who would see in it a mere battle between 
opposing political principles. It was the result of so 
many separate forces, some of them nothing but indi- 
vidual panic or hatred, that it might almost have appeared 
a blind turmoil driven by fate one way, as a wind drives 
the innumerable confusion of cross-seas and eddies. But 
there was present there a certain interior current of opinion 
that accounted for the main direction, at least since it de- 
termined the final action of the majority, and it was upon 
the silent and obscure majority that the fortunes of this 
day depended. An appreciation of that interior current 
will explain the issue. 

It sprang from two ill-connected but allied emotions : 
the reaction against the Terror; the fear of an attack 
on the Convention. 

For the first, it will seem here, as thoughout the few 
weeks which were treated of in the last chapter, a strange 
thing that such a reaction should attach a special enmity 
to Robespierre. The more intimately one knows the man, 
the more closely one examines the details of his last actions, 
the more apparent does it become that he was now the 
principal opponent of the Terrorists. Had some miracle 
invested him at this moment with the supreme power, 
the executions he might have ordered would have been 
those of the executioners themselves ; and perhaps, of all 
the definite and anxious groups opposed to him in Ther- 



336 ROBESPIERRE 

midor, none liad a juster view or a more direct objective 
than that which sought to destroy him because he stood 
for the weakening of their awful engine of government. 
But his own scheming, the known opinion of his friends lq 
the Commune, his pubhc name had filled the air of Paris 
with a false idea. The name of Robespierre had taken 
the place of Providence, and had become the origin of all. 
If men " thou'ed " and " yea'ed," it was Robespierre. If 
they were bent and forced into an egalitarian model, it 
was Robespierre. And what was the supreme physical fact 
from which no one could escape ? What stood like an 
obsession in the public mind ? The stream of the con- 
demned; a useless and disgusting survival, jarring in a 
noisome contrast against the summer light, against the 
new hopes of the nation, and the cheering for the victories. 
When the last forty-five, obscure, unmeriting death, had 
passed that day out of the Cour du Mai, when that convoy 
had forced through the unwilling crowd of the suburbs, 
through their murmurs, and (as some say) ^ their active 
force, then it was against Robespierre that the workmen 
called out loudly. In spite of himself the tumbrils were 
Robespierre. He had been proud to stand before Europe 
as the Revolution personified; the result of so hiding 
himself behind a symbol was that he had to stand also 
for the system which was now fallen to odium. An 
assembly cannot escape the atmosphere of the capital in 
which it meets. The law of Prairial had centered all the 
horror upon Paris, and the judgment of Paris ran in 
common, like a thing taken for granted, through the 
dumb mass of the ParUament. The provinces, in which 
his name had begun to stand for moderation, had no time 
to be heard. 

The second element in the opinion ot the Conven- 

* Michelet is probably wrong, at least in his description of the military 
being used to restrain the populace. Hanriot cannot possibly have been 
there. He "was lunching with friends a mile ofE, in the Rue St. Antoine. 



"THERMIDOR" 337 

tion, the fear of an armed attack, was perhaps the most 
powerful, as it was certainly the most tangible and 
obvious of the forces making against " the triumvirs." It 
is certain that some one had imprudently raised the 
cry of a 3 1 st of May the night before at the Jacobins, 
and Couthon had there passed that wild resolution which 
expelled from the Club every member of the Conven- 
tion that had voted against the printing of Robespierre's 
speech. 

These two perils, the peril of the Terror and the 
peril of an attack on the Parliament, were enough 
in the tension of Thermidor to gather a coalition of 
defence. 

But what a great run of acts had risen to make 
such a coalition certain and formidable ! There had 
been no such " organisation of the thunderbolt " since 
that day, fourteen months before, when in the agony 
of the invasion and in the face of the blind obsti- 
nacy of the Gironde, Danton had permitted the 2nd 
of June. Hanriot was known to have sent out his 
orders ; the sections were assembling. The gunners 
had already passed from two districts. Members coming 
in from the carrousel, had seen the pieces go rum- 
bling by. Hanriot had been summoned by the com- 
mittees, and had refused to come; that of itself was 
insurrection. Payan had come, but insolently; pitting 
the real power of Paris against their theory of authority, 
and they had let him go. That was an act of submission 
to the Commune. The Jacobins had organised their 
deputations to the Hotel de Ville. Duplay, the host, the 
friend, the adorer of Robespierre, had been seen in the 
midst of their deputations. 

The night and the early morning had been full of 
arms, and even at that moment of midday the great 
crowd of the Convention waited in every rare interval 
of silence for a sound like doom, the Tocsin. The awful 

Y 



338 ROBESPIERRE 

bourdon of Notre Dame -^ tliat had twice before called up 
the cannon like younger brothers and filled the streets 
with united men, might at one moment or another send 
its distant hum into the deep pit where the Parliament 
stirred and dreaded. The Tocsin did not sound till night 
had fallen, and by that time their unanimity in action 
and the inertia of a Paris sick of blood and refusing to 
rise for a man, had saved the Convention. 

But the mainspring of this opposition to the Com- 
mune; that was growing with every moment in the 
Tuileries, was not fear. If there were many Siey^s in 
the Convention, yet were there more Legendres. The 
solid sense of Cambon, the republican confidence of the 
Left Centre, the remaining and general enthusiasm for the 
work of the Revolution, armed these men with the deter- 
mination that a faction, even if it had all the capital at 
its back, should not destroy the national representation. 
And they believed, what was perhaps the truth, that with 
the success of any attack upon their body, government 
would finally fall into the hands of one man. 

So under the nausea that the Terror had caused, and 
under the fear of and indignation against the menace of 
the Commune, the opinion of the majority formed and 
grew. Robespierre, more than ever an emblem, was now 
in the eyes of the Parliament the figurehead of that 
terrible Commune, which — in spite of himself — was 
assuming his name and preparing revolt. 

But the first phase of the struggle was confused. 
There was as yet no certitude that this formed and 
enlarging opinion would be put into action. Tallien's 
cry had provoked a violent applause ; the apj)lause pro- 
ceeded only from his immediate followers. A second 
incident provoked a little the tendency to general action. 
St. Just might yet have continued when Billaud-Varennes, 

1 But the great bell never rang ; by some fate it is silent unless the 
city really moves. 



"THERMIDOR" 339 

his face alive witli passion, cried to Collot in tlie chair 
that he would speak on a point of order. It was a sight 
to see Collot (hissed, turned out, and stabbed at in the 
Jacobins the night before) give Billaud (hissed, turned out, 
and stabbed at with him) the right to raise a point of 
order. Billaud carried a great deal in his heart. St. Just 
had promised him an explanation — just as the Parlia- 
ment met he had sent him a short note of refusal, 
saying, " I will open my soul to the Convention." He 
remembered that struggle in the dawn and was 
aflame. 

Billaud then, fresh from the Committees that were 
coming into the hall with him as Tallien spoke, saw St. 
Just reluctantly leave the tribune, sprang into it himself 
and flung at the Assembly with violence the words that 
all had dreaded, and which, once launched, could not but 
drag the majority with him. 

" What I have to speak of is a plot. There is a plot 
to destroy the Convention. I was at the Jacobins last 
night, and even there they tried to kill the members they 
had proscribed. I tell you the Convention is lost unless 
it acts at once. . . . There are men who will destroy you 
and who have said it in the club." 

Then, with a sudden gesture he probed the nerve of 
the great audience before him in the crisis of its self- 
defence. He threw out a rigid arm towards the upper 
benches of the Left, to the Mountain in the shadow 
under the gallery, and cried : " There is one of them." 

Thus was provoked the first combined movement of 
the day; the movement that gave the Convention a soul 
and a voice ; that could only end in the loss of Robes- 
pierre. Great bodies rose to their feet till it seemed as 
if the whole hall were moving, and a mass of voices called 
out together at this nameless fellow, an obscure victim 
whom Billaud had marked out, " Arrest him ! " The 
public galleries caught the spirit of defence that had 



340 ROBESPIERRE 

sprung from tlie representatives ; up there the populace 
of Paris did what it had never yet done : it cheered the 
Convention against the Jacobins. The victories and 
the reaction had accomplished what Vergniaud's grave 
voice, Isnard's fervour, Desmoulins' pen, and even Danton's 
mastery had been unable to do : they had reconverted 
Paris to the dignity and integrity of the nation. The 
unknown Jacobin, the first victim of the sacrifice, dis- 
appeared. That honest man Lebas tried to put himself 
against the flood ; it swept him away ; he sat down under 
the ominous cry, " k I'Abbaye," and was silent till, within 
two hours, he gave up his life for the sake of honour. 

The Convention was started and organised on its way. 
But if anything could have ruined the conspiracy it was 
surely the nature of the conspirators. For over an hour 
Billaud and Tallien monopolised the tribune, pouring out 
without reason words to unite their audience and words 
to divide it ; without ability, given up to mere passion, 
they said things much more calculated to confuse than 
to drill the opposition which they had determined to 
organise against the triumvirs. Billaud exaggerated the 
yielding of Robespierre at the time of Danton's arrest 
into an active impediment : his mind, ill- acquainted with 
men, could not grasp the fundamental fact that in the 
eyes of whatever was most active in the Convention, all 
the attack on Robespierre, was the very resurrection of 
Danton. Two friends of the dead man prove it. 
Legendre, remembering Danton, was to do the decisive 
thing that night and to close the Jacobins. Thuriot, 
remembering Danton, was to shut Robespierre's mouth 
in the supreme hour. 

As for Billaud, he stumbled on, falling over himself 
in his passion. He continued to attack Robespierre for 
putting a brake on the Terror, for saving La Valette — 
he did not see that the motive force of the engine before 
him depended upon a reaction against the Terror. Only 



"THERMIDOR" 34^ 

one tiling preserved Billaud from an anti-climax — his in- 
tensity. That violence of his, spurred on by the memory 
of a night's insults, inflamed by lack of sleep, so far suc- 
ceeded that it forbade the Convention to hear Robespierre, 
and that great loud cries of " Tyrant ! Tyrant ! " fell upon 
him from here and there when he attempted to rise. 
He, the master of so many debates, then judged the 
moment inopportune and bided his time. 

The active movements, the arrests, began to appear. 
Tallien, nothing but a comedian, brandished a dagger 
" with which to die or kill a tyrant," and it is on record 
that the house saw nothing in the gesture but a piece 
of actor's foolery. But when he mentioned the name 
of Hanriot he touched earth again, and the Convention 
was very willing. Because of the danger, because of the 
guns gathering into the centre of Paris, they permitted 
this mime whom every man despised to move the first 
of the arrests that ended in the wiping out of the 
Jacobins and in the death of the extremists. Hanriot 
was declared a prisoner. Down that easy path of free- 
dom the Convention went racing ; in declaring the arrest 
of the head of the armed force of Paris, and that of his 
staff, the Parhament had taken sides at last. All that 
remained was to see if their policy could be pushed to 
the very end. They passed yet another vote. They 
declared themselves " to be in permanent session till the 
sword of the law had made the Revolution secure." 

Still Robespierre and his were safe ; so far not Robes- 
pierre but the Commune alone had been touched; it 
was but the early afternoon, and after the first furies, 
what with Tallien's absurdities and Billaud's random 
violence, a kind of weariness set in upon the Convention. 
In voting that Hanriot should be arrested, and that they, 
the Convention, should remain the only source of govern- 
ment, they had, as it were, clinched the first and most 
practical part of what had become their programme 



342 ROBESPIERRE 

of defence. It was not yet certain they would go 
further. 

At this point in the vast struggle between absolute 
democracy and varied nature returning, there came an 
interlude, almost a repose. Barr^re rose. 

Barr^re was a man whose character, though by no 
means complex, is so foreign to those who are attracted 
by the study of the past that he is not so much mis- 
judged as turned into an impossible monster by the 
greater part of historians. To take but those who are 
in sympathy with the Reform ; they are almost of neces- 
sity enamoured of stoicism, leaning always towards 
Vergniaud or Condorcet, worshipping what is strict and 
firm in principle. Barrere was empty of principle. He 
can be described in two words, he was a Gascon 
official. 

He was a Gascon, therefore he was a brave, pliant, 
ambitious, careless, and somewhat impudent orator. He 
was an official, and therefore had most at heart the con- 
servation of his own official position and of the organ of 
government for which he stood. 

The mouthpiece of the committee, he knew that its 
unity was essential to the continuance of its power ; the 
sometime associate of Danton in foreign policy, he knew 
how keenly the divisions within the government were 
watched by the allies. A go-between who had saved 
Billaud from St. Just and St. Just from Billaud during 
the long-drawn quarrel of the night, he had felt the 
weakness of either party. 

At this moment of indecision it was Barrfere that 
intervened, and there can be no doubt that he inter- 
vened to save Robespierre and the unity of the Com- 
mittee. St. Just's report, had it been delivered, would 
have been of greater effect. But of the words actually 
spoken in that famous debate, those of Barrere's two 
speeches came nearest to saving the Republic from the 



"THERMIDOR" 343 

catastrophe that was perhaps the ultimate salvation of 
the country. 

He spoke in such a spirit of compromise that had 
the most able advocate been retained for the mere pur- 
pose of saving lives the work could not have been better 
done. What the Convention had voted he left voted. 
Hanriot gone, he proposed to replace him by that refuge 
against personal power, a commission — a commission 
formed of the heads of the legions of the National 
Guards. The Convention feared Payan and Lescot ; but 
they were Robespierre's men. To leave them untouched 
seemed like a retreat before the Commune ; to condemn 
them, like an attack on Robespierre in person. Barr^re 
solved the quarrel by suggesting that they should both 
be summoned and sworn in to protect the Parliament. 
Finally he argued the cause of the committee against 
Robespierre's vague accusations of the day before, not 
as one would combat a man attempting despotism, but 
as one would reason with a colleague open to conversion. 
And what is most remarkable in this effort of his is the 
fact that he did not so much as mention Robespierre's 
own name — the naine of which all men's minds were full, 
and which when at last it was blurted out could open a 
battle on the issue of the sound alone. 

So much for the great Committee. As though to 
increase the effect of a speech that was so calculated to 
succeed, and that so nearly succeeded, the old man 
Vadier, rising on the part of the lower committee, and 
meaning to reassume the attack against Robespierre, 
did but emphasise the apparent return to peace. His 
snuffling utterance, his self-repetitions, his heavy bearing, 
leaning forward on his hands against the rail of the 
tribune, his uncertain memory did but add a note of 
the ridiculous to what had been for more than ten 
trailing hours, and was to be again for a furious and 
decisive moment, a tragedy. The crowd of young men 



344 ROBESPIERRE 

•whom this forgotten relic chose to address was moved 
to laughter. Flattered in some senile way by that 
laughter, Vadier approached the buffoon, left all men- 
tion of the more serious attack upon Robespierre, and 
disported himself in allusions to Catherine Theot and 
to the absurd pranks that had cast their ineffaceable 
ridicule over the public idolatry of her god. 

Robespierre allowed the laughter that followed to 
rise unchallenged, and even constrained himself to smile. 
Impassionate but stretched to an acute attention, he may, 
for all his self- absorption, have noticed that something 
not far removed from good-humour — at his expense, in- 
deed, but still good-humour — was coming over those 
•whom he had dominated so long but whom in one or 
two lightning flashes of that terrible day he had seen 
as pitiless judges. When Vadier hobbled down the 
steps from the tribune, the failure of his doting, coming 
as it did after the ability of Barrere, had brought 
Robespierre very near to safety. It was the moment 
when he seemed at last secure, and when an observer 
would have said that the sharp strain of the last two 
days was to end after all in a slow relaxation : Robes- 
pierre less powerful; the committee less tyrannical and 
also less divided ; the Convention more master of itself ; 
the Commune become merely Paris ; the Terror ending. 

This was the point of relaxation which the debate 
had reached when the fortunes of the triumvirs appeared 
for one moment to revive. Have I made its vagaries 
seem confused and without direction ? It is because the 
discussion itself passed through bewildering phases and 
preserved no logical order save, perhaps, the transition 
from violence to exhaustion. A living man who had 
seen it with his own eyes from the galleries would so 
have described it, and the strange paradox of that 
moment, when disaster seemed to be receding, would 
have led him to the conclusion I have named. But 



"THERMIDOR" 345 

falsely ; no relaxation nor any solution of tlie crisis was 
possible save the fate that was coming. An orator might 
soothe the Assembly with suggestion or a dotard amuse 
it, but the Commune was still the Commune. Hanriot 
sat his horse still with a drawn sword for all their votes. 
It needed but a word to thrust their danger into their 
faces and to startle them into cohesion. 

Robespierre himself pronounced the word. Tallien, 
vexed at the laughter that Vadier had provoked, and 
knowing how nearly allied are laughter and pity, 
came to the tribune yet again, crying angrily, " The 
discussion must be brought back to the point . . ." 
His sentence was not completed. Robespierre, who had 
once known the Convention better than any other man 
and who still thought he knew it in this transformation 
and revival, committed the imprudence that closed all 
free debate and let loose a storm. He stood up in his 
place without restraint, and with a gesture of anger to 
which the Convention was unfamiliar, in a voice that had 
abandoned its former control, he said suddenly, " I shall 
know well enough how to bring back the debate to order." 

High as was his utterance, weak as he ever appeared 
on the rare occasions when his zeal or his dignity left him 
and when he fell to personal issues, yet there was in this 
sentence a fatal element. It revived the memories of the 
day before when men had looked at each other and had 
waited for the name of the proscribed. It was, for all 
the thin voice that uttered it, a menace; and it drew 
down upon the head of its author the clamour which it 
should have been his first business to conjure away. One 
by one the forces that denied him the right of defence, 
and that ended by destroying him, rose, now from this 
bench, now from that, in the solid mass of men before 
him ; but principally in the centre and left centre this 
hint of his, a hint at tyranny, raised the loud murmur 
that grew to a drowning noise and overwhelmed him. It 



346 ROBESPIERRE 

was tlie same cry as that wliicli had angered and pro- 
voked him an hour before, but now it devoured him. 
With every effort that he made to speak a monotonous 
and angry swarm of the same word, " Tyrant ! Tyrant ! " 
filled the air about him, confusing his thoughts and 
stinging him out of all control. He that had never 
there done anything yet but watch and mould his 
hearers, and deal with them, and choose his words, 
became like a man struggling with physical oppression. 

A whirlwind sprang. Tallien spoke unheard. The bell 
rang and covered and confused the eddying of innumer- 
able voices. This accusation and that, mixed up with 
the noise of the storm, rose and was lost again. A 
larger and simpler outcry outweighing every definite 
voice and every articulate reason, something blinder than 
man or men, the pack hunting, filled the deep hall with 
" Tyrant ! Tyrant ! " like a driving foam over seas at night. 

Robespierre at that moment was utterly different 
from all that the older members of the Convention or his 
friends or France had known for five years. His ped- 
antry dropped off him ; hard sentences spoken from the 
soul, heedless of notes, left his eyes clear of the glasses 
that had veiled them even during his defence of twenty- 
four hours before. He did not rise into the tribune, but, 
stepping out from the bench where he had sat at random 
into the floor of the hall, he accepted with his eyes the 
thousand faces whose unity arose to blast him, and he 
was possessed for a moment of a freedom and energy that 
were hardly part of himself. He felt. The air was still 
full of the swarm of " Tjo-ant ! Tyrant ! " when he passed 
right in front of the President's chair, across the tribune 
and the secretaries, and, folding his arms, he looked 
straight up at the Mountain. 

There was his home. He was a man of subtle 
temper, over-metaphysical, inclined to posture also : still, 
he had come out of that band of ardent men who founded 



"THERMIDOR" 347 

the Kepublic. There he had sat not two years before 
when the newly elected members for Paris and the pride 
of the Southern Blood had determined the new career of 
France. Among these old comrades some hand or some 
voice would be raised. What face looked out at him 
thence from the darkness beneath the galleries ? Dubois 
Crance, that had been a mousquetaire, that was all a noble 
and that had still a small smile playing about his large 
mouth. This soldier, cropped-haired, bronze-faced, strait- 
headed, looked down upon him and made no sound. 
Robespierre had denounced him once because he, a 
soldier, dared to give quarter in Lyons ; he had recalled 
him from the west. And with Crance you may read 
all the Mountain. Some in that party feared, some 
despised, some condemned the influence of a single 
man; but of all the soil whence he had sprung no 
one moved. Then, because he was hunted and alone, 
he turned himself round, still outwardly contained, but 
with the nervous quivering of his jaws working again, 
and saw the hundreds upon hundreds that went up 
in tiers and were the plain and the Right; royahsts 
under him, silent men, men who " continued to live " in 
the Terror. He had never yet depended upon them; 
they had continually depended upon him. He begged — 
it was abject, but he was never a fighter — the alliance 
of those of whom he had once been protector; a mix- 
ture of violent cries, of hidden laughs, and of silence 
foiled him. He called them the " pure men " — that 
is, the men without politics, a just title — it raised no 
echo. 

To a gulf of silence another wave of intolerable 
sound succeeded. He sought to dominate it by speech, 
but in the chair above him, whether distraught by the 
renewed anarchy or whether deliberate, CoUot d'Herbois 
refused to listen but only called for order, ringing his 
great bell. 



348 ROBESPIERRE 

Then Kobespierre, quite beside himself now and 
shouting epithets, turned upon him and called on 
him for a last time — called him a " Speaker of mur- 
derers," but even as he turned, the thing he found was 
no longer the expected enemy. It was not Collot 
d'Herbois that he saw above him presiding, but a young 
man from the valley of the Marne, a man who had 
come from the poplars and slow rivers, the Pouilleuse; 
from the place where you may see a long way off on the 
edges of the sky the great hill of Eheims and the vines, 
and the forest over all. Thuriot sat above him, and the 
memory of Danton ran through the hall. That young 
commander, a smile of the Champagne, had neither time 
to silence him nor to give him speech, when, as Kobes- 
pierre exhausted by so violent an effort against a wall 
of men left an interval of silence, another man from the 
Marne — from the little Aube — another Danton again 
returning, the unknown Garnier, cried across the hall: 
" The blood of Danton chokes you." 

Not knowing well what he said, confused by such 
different adversaries (he had within the hour been ac- 
cused of defending Danton), Robespierre looked up a 
moment, cried out, " So, you reproach me with Dan- 
ton . . ." and then by a movement unique in his life, 
he ran up the extreme gangway of the Left and faced the 
Convention. He had leaned more and more away from 
the pure Republic, more and more back to mysticism 
and tolerance and alliance with the creeds, but in this 
supreme moment he stood in the place belonging to the 
extreme stoics from whom he had drawn his first 
powers and to whose keeping after death his legend 
was to return. It was a thing mysterious and crammed 
with meaning that he who had eschewed all poignancy 
and all sudden force of gesture, whose very nature was 
opposed to immediate effects, now stretched out his 
hands in the attitude which is at once that of appeal 



"THERMIDOR" 349 

and of despair, and cried out, "Vote for my death." No 
one answered. 

A certain Loucliet, an obscure, just man, one that 
later stood out firmly for the Kepublic against the 
muddy flood of the reaction, called out clearly across the 
silence, " Arrest him ! " 

The cry determined not only his arrest — that was 
of course — but was also the cue for as signal an act of 
heroism and of devotion as our modern history records. 
Le Bas that had consistently loved him, and upon whose 
clear northern temper no suspicion of unreason can 
attach itself, rose in his place and said that if Robespierre 
was to die, he also demanded death. His friends near 
him caught his coat to pull him down. Out in the 
Rue St. Honor^ an admirable woman was waiting for his 
return ; a child, rather, and her child.^ In a noble en- 
thusiasm he threw everything away for honour. Then, 
shamed by so much virtue, Augustin, that had never 
done much good to himself nor much evil to the public, 
rose also, saying that what his brother suffered he would 
suffer. But if one triumvir, then three also of necessity and 
logic had to pass. Couthon, in spite of his lameness, St. 
Just, in spite of his contemptuous silence, suffered the 
vote. All these three, a little band that had dreamed 
vain things were put to the judgment of the Assembly ; 
and when Thuriot asked for the Noes, so silent was the 
Mountain that he could write in the register that yet 
remains, " Unanimity." So, in a hubbub that declined 
into repose, the last scene of the Republic was acted. 

Some one asked them to leave the Assembly and 
stand at the bar. They went and stood. Then another 
asked why no officers had them in custody. It was 
because the officers could not yet believe that this had 

^ Who lived to be Lebas the Hellenist, professor and friend of all the 
university, tutor to the third Napoleon, but yet a republican and a 
guide to younger republicans. 



350 ROBESPIERRE 

happened. When the order was given by the president, 
the ushers formally laid their hands upon the shoulders 
of the men that had imagined a new earth. There was 
nothing more to be done. A few vain remarks and 
platitudes, a sudden enthusiasm for the Republic which 
the Convention thought to have saved, the stampede of 
the public galleries, and the adjournment for two hours 
ended this memorable victory. It was not yet five of the 
afternoon; four hours had decided the battle. 

When this first part of the work was accomplished 
the sky gave no relief; an unnatural evening ready for 
further evil brooded sultry and oppressive above the city. 

In the minds of men also a strange mixture of close 
activity and of reluctance, things moving in silence, filled 
the remaining hours of daylight. This contrast pro- 
ceeded from the spirit that lends all its irony to Ther- 
midor. Paris was confused. To judge by the immediate 
readiness or fury of the Commune it might have been 
the great loth of August, the rising for national exist- 
ence; it might have been full peace to judge by the 
quiet certitude of the Convention. Each was deceived. 
The Parliament had no force to meet the populace had 
the populace armed ; the municipal body had no populace 
to arm. The legal authority of the one, the moral 
leadership of the other, turned into a smoke of phrases ; 
and, after most inconsequent adventures, the midnight 
struggle in which the drama ended was but the success 
of a few dozens over a handful of individuals. 

Yet so tenacious was the tradition of the Revolution 
in the hearts of the politicians, so little did they see how 
the great victories had calmed political violence, that 
each group went on, in the air and dissociated from 
reality, thinking, the one that a city, the other that a 
nation was behind it. At the Hotel de Ville the full 
enthusiasm of '93 blazed out ; the great words were 



"THERMIDOR" 351 

rediscovered and the sharp decisions upon which the 
Revolution had hitherto turned were taken. It was 
five o'clock when Herman's note,^ official but very non- 
committal in its language and in the person of its bearer, 
came to the Commune. Fleuriot-Lescot received it and 
the insurrection the municipality had planned took shape 
immediately. The Council-General was summoned, Payan 
did what in a greater moment and for a national purpose 
Danton had done; he opened the doors to the general 
crowd; the crowd entered but was silent. With that 
kneading of direct action and passion which the Revolu- 
tion had discovered, the Commune threw out decree after 
decree, each in the right order, each so framed that had 
there been a Paris to answer them, an organised army 
with its spirit and its plan would have arisen in two 
hours ; but they worked in a void. 

The barriers were to be shut, the tocsin rung, the 
drums were to beat the mobilisation, the cannons were 
summoned, the sections were to meet to remain in per- 
manence and to arm ; Hanriot was given his objective — 
the Convention ; the Convention was " to be freed." But 
these gates, bells, drums, marches and attacks, were not 
machines whose levers the Commune held ; they depended 
upon men for their agency or no bells would ring, no 
drums beat. The very theory of the Commune had dis- 
solved cohesion in the solvent of liberty, and the fatigue 
of the great wars had drugged spontaneity to sleep. Such 
few citizens as gathered in the sections, debated on false 
issues ; hesitated, dared not. The tocsin rang spasmodic- 
ally here and there ; ceased in St. German's, began too late 
in St. Antoine, was made a quarrel of in St. Roch. Only 
the thin bell of the Hotel de Ville itself swung continuously 

* It was nothing but what he was bound to send ; an official message 
of the arrest despatched to the municipality of Paris by the hand of a 
messenger. The mayor got it at five o'clock, about a quarter of an hour 
after tke vote, so it must have been sent from the Tuileries. 



3S2 ROBESPIERRE 

in its dainty cupola, as thougli to show tliat only the 
federate band of the municipality felt that the moment 
was supreme or could maintain a purpose. As for the 
mother of the city, Notre Dame, it was silent. 

To this torrent of active, empty decrees in the Hotel 
de Ville there was answered another torrent, paper also, 
in the great room of the Pavilion de Flore. The Con- 
vention was not without a head, the Committee of Public 
Safety lent itself to be the organ and authority of the law. 
The decrees fell like leaves; to swing the gates open, to ring 
no peal, to dissolve the sections, none to obey Hanriot, 
to arrest every man that rebelled. They signed and 
signed ; they called the lower committee In to help them ; 
what authority their names would give was poured out 
as though the great Committee had never hesitated, and 
as though the moment were indeed (as some historians 
have been misled into thinking it) the crisis of a long 
struggle and the end of a set plan. ■ If they failed they 
were willing to risk the fate of failure. Carnot gave his 
name to half the documents, Barrer^ to nearly all, Prieur 
to whatever was presented to him. In this decision to 
throw away the scabbard the Committee were acting as 
their enemy the Commune also desired to act ; but with 
more thoroughness. For when young Payan had sum- 
moned the Council- General of the municipality in the 
Hotel de Ville there were hesitations : not all consented to 
sign the list of insurrection, and there was some attempt 
to destroy even such signatures as had been given. 

What meaning could attach to these opposing bat- 
talions of words, these soundless batteries of official 
papers ? This ; the Commune was but half obeyed, 
but the Committee and the Convention seemed to be 
obeyed altogether. Every citizen that sat down to his 
meal, every gate left open, every bell left silent appeared 
a homage to the Parliament. Had they turned to 
positive decrees; had they ordered action, Paris would 



" THERMIDOR " 353 

not have moved mucli more for them than for the 
Hotel de Ville, but the negative commands of the Com- 
mittee fell on a neutral Paris, and clothed their authors 
with an appearance of power. For if to a lethargic man 
one says, " Do this," another, " Do not do this," the second 
appears to be the master. 

Meanwhile Paris dined. The Convention, while its 
Committee thus slaved, had adjourned till seven ; it 
mingled with the life of the city, it dined with the rest. 

And the five prisoners dined. 

There are gaps in the story of Thermidor that are 
like the inconsequent accidents of a dream. There 
should have been a pomp and some great force holding 
these men — Robespierre, Lebas, Couthon, St. Just 
should have gone off the prisoners of a brigade — they 
went down the few steps to the rooms of the lower com- 
mittee with no one but the ushers of the house to guard 
them. There, attended only by the sergeant's guard that 
was constantly posted and that had received no accession 
of strength, they very easily and soberly dined. 

What came to rescue them and to affirm the insur- 
rection ? A great mob or the organisation of a bat- 
talion ? Nothing of the kind. Hanriot, heavy with 
wine, started off with a couple of aides-de-camp and 
perhaps half-a-dozen friends. In the Rue St. Honor^ 
Courtois called him names out of window. He passed 
on. Farther down the street he met a gentleman 
walking ; he heard the gentleman mentioned as opposed 
to Robespierre; he had him sent off under a corporal 
and four men to the post of the Palais Royal.^ He 
appeared at the rooms of the lower committee and 
argued with the guard ; they opposed his opinions. He 
drew his sword as he stood in the doorway. A deputy 
of the committee got up on the table and ordered the 
guard to arrest him and his companions. They did so, 

1 An eye-witness told Gallois this. 



354 ROBESPIERRE 

and as lie was a strong and violent man they bound him 
with, cords.^ Meanwhile Robespierre, not a little dis- 
turbed at a man's leaping on the table where he was dining, 
rose from his plate and napkin and interrupted his meal 
to advise Hanriot not to resist ; saying he desired nothing 
more than a trial at the bar of the revolutionary tribunal. 
The others sat on at meat till the scuffle was over. 

There is something terrible in this splash of gro- 
tesque : the handful that appeared on the great stage 
of a decisive hour, without audience, in such a small 
domestic way, and without any one circumstance of 
tragedy. The incongruity of such unaccented scenes 
determining so great an event was part of the spirit of 
Thermidor : it fell in with the silence and stillness of the 
air, with the steady grey sky, the even, growing heat, and 
the delay of the storm. 

Some while yet before seven, their meal over, little 
detachments of the guard took each of the five separately 
to separate prisons. Lebas to La Force,^ along the 
narrow streets eastwards, past the very doors of the 
Commune. St. Just to the old Scotch college on the 
hill of the university. It had been made a rough 
prison of for the time, and there, encased in lead, 
the brain of the last Stuart watched in the wall beside 
him. Robespierre was taken beyond to the Luxembourg : 
the two others to St. Lazare and to La Bourbe. 

All this went easily and well. The note of that dinner 
table was continued. There was no rebellion or violence, 
nor even argument. Robespierre was confident of trial ; 
the rest were either silent with pride (as was St. Just), 
or left their fate to the confidence of Robespierre (as 

1 The oflScial report says: " The said sergeant being ordered to bind 
his hands and feet, this was accomplished with great accuracy." 

2 When Madame Lebas says in lier " Memoirs," " The conciergerie," she 
must be thinking of the scene which I shall describe in a moment. Lebas 
was certainly taken first to La Force as the registers show. The jailers 
refusing to receive him he was led to the conciergerie. 



"THERMIDOR" 355 

did Lebas and Augustine). None marked their passage, no 
appeal was made ; the astounding silence of Paris left an 
empty and wide road for their various passages. 

Meanwhile the Commune, that had seized reality and 
was determined on a supreme effort, had all prepared, as 
it thought, to save the Republic in which it still pas- 
sionately lived, and for which this man still stood. 

The Commune had done much since the first insurrec- 
tionary call, though but two hours had been given them 
in which to act. They had raised the Jacobins; at 
seven, just as the prisoners reached their prisons, the 
remnant of the great club met to make a wing of the 
insurrection, I say " a remnant," yet it was still the 
Jacobins. A man could stand up in it and say he had 
voted against Robespierre and the momentary violence 
that followed such a declaration was succeeded by his re- 
call and by an attempted apology. It sent a deputation 
to the Commune ; it declared a permanent session. 

The sections, the primary assemblies whose permanent 
officials and whose interested leaders were men drilled 
and chosen by what had been Robespierre's organisation, 
met also. The common citizens came in small numbers, 
and such as came were uncertain, leaning if anything 
towards the Convention. They passed neutral votes. 
They did not march. The night oppressed them, 
and the universal falling back into repose. Also the 
Commune with a strange audacity, being in reality a 
dead relic but thinking themselves all Paris, declared 
outlaws all those whom they called conspirators against 
the deputies. They forbade any man to follow the 
national authority, saying that till the nation and liberty 
were saved they alone ruled. 

One part of the officials heard them — the jailers. At 
St. Lazare an excuse was found for refusing to receive 
Augustine ; he was led away to La Force, and there two 
municipals in arms took him their willing prisoner for 



2s6 ROBESPIERRE 

the Commune, and brought Wm back to the Hotel de 
Ville rescued, the first of the five. So Lebas, refused 
at La Force and sent on to the Conciergerie on the Island, 
was freed. Just as he went off, a hh'ed carriage driving 
up brought him his wife and her sister, who implored 
his return. He was tender to her and remembered the 
little child : he told her to wait till the morning. She 
went home, and he to the gathering crowd of the 
insurrection at the Hotel de Ville; but they did not 
meet again, for in the night this man, whose simple and 
republican mind compels me to admiration as I write 
his name, gave himself death. 

While the Commune sent out its emissaries to the 
university to rescue St. Just, and to La Bourbe to rescue 
Couthon, Robespierre had thrown away the last of the 
cards fate offered him. 

They had taken him first to the Luxembourg in a 
cab. He had gone up the hill of old quarter simply, 
hardly under a guard.^ The wide Rue Tournon received 
the closed carriage in which he drove, and he reached 
the palace. The porter replied as the porter of every 
prison had replied that evening, but he, not from a 
premonition but from an insistent legality, demanded 
admission. The Convention had arrested him ; he would 
obey it. He desired to stand his trial. Of all this the 
porter knew nothing, and, half tempted by an apparent 
safety, he permitted his companions (for they were 
hardly his enemies) to drive him down the hill again 
— they scarcely knew whither. 

Since all the jailers in the capital showed this same 
temper, Charnier perhaps, or the gendarme with him, 
bethought him of a guard-room. The armed force, the 
sections, were at least doubtful or perhaps loyal to the 
Parliament, and he was half sick of his mission. The 
nearest guard-room was that of the Mairie on the Island, 

^ There were with him only Charnier and one gendarme. 



"THERMTDOR" 357 

tlirougli the oldest and darkest streets of tlie university; 
therefore he drove his charge down to the river, and 
across the Pont-Neuf to the Goldsmith's Quay. They 
left him there less under arrest than among neutrals. 

It was still light, more or less, in the street without ; 
the Place de Gr^ve beyond the law courts, across the 
Seine, was filling with men ; the lamps that swung 
over the narrow streets were being lowered for light- 
ing. The clear noise that comes up from a French 
town on long summer evenings was the chorus of 
that little scene. 

The militia guard of the Island would neither fight 
for Robespierre nor detain him. They had paid little 
heed to the Commune; they had understood little of 
the Convention. They found Robespierre among them, 
and were somewhat embarrassed. He sat, still powdered, 
careful and restrained at the rough table which a dozen 
dirty uniforms, the drippings of one oil-lamp, and the 
growing darkness infected with squalor. Here was the 
famous name they had heard of so often — perhaps the 
Republic in person ; they were not over sure. They 
would neither fight for him nor detain him. 

Had he remained there steadfast to his first deter- 
mination, sleeping that night on the planks of the guard- 
room and demanding his trial next day at the bar of the 
revolutionary tribunal, he might have left the Island safe 
to return to freedom ; lessened indeed, part only of 
government, but still alive — he and his theory alive. 
The river was his bulwark ; the great law courts, in 
whose vaults he sat half a prisoner, were his refuge. He 
guessed it, but there ran in him that fatal flaw of vision- 
aries, by which in easy times they lose their wealth and 
in times of tumult their lives ; he could not judge upon 
or mould the things under his hand, but continued to 
live in the things beyond the world. A sharp accident 
persuaded him against himself. 



358 ROBESPIERRE 

Hanriot, released at last, had sought Robespierre at 
the Luxembourg, and had returned without him. The 
Commune had again sent out to discover him. There 
appeared in the doorless arch of his refuge some few 
figures of the Hotel de Ville. They had come for him 
and had found him there, almost the last of the Five. 
He refused to follow them and to step outside the law. 
The darkness grew. They returned. He suffered him- 
self to be led on by their ardour and their active habit ; 
he came out into the dying light and no hand stopped 
him nor was any bayonet crossed. He passed through 
the labyrinth of tall houses, before the porch, where, as a 
boy, he had remembered the chapter of the cathedral and 
his cousin the priest that had loved him ; over the old 
bridofe of Notre Dame where the river was still broad 
silver, and came out upon the Place de Grfeve with his 
companions, who rejoiced as at a kind of triumph. 

Indistinguishable in the heavy darkness a crowd 
there disputed and eddied. There was a little faint 
acclamation : he did not heed it. They hurried him 
through the uncertain hundreds towards the high and 
delicate fagade that showed blacker against the eastward 
arch of the night, and under the lowering sky of a re- 
turning storm. It seemed a creature ready for prey. 
Its tall, great windows were all lit and menaced the west 
like eyes ; its soul of insurrection moved in it as though 
with a voice and an intelligence it could drive Paris 
against the nation and hurl the Convention from the 
sombre palace that stood up a mile away, a fortress 
against the last bars of daylight. That living beast was 
the Commune. It swallowed him up. 

The great hall that he entered upon the first floor 
was filled with men ^ and ablaze with candles. Save 
Couthon all the rescued had arrived : like Hanriot, 
bound early in the evening by half-a-dozen enemies and 

1 Ninety-seven signed the roll, but there were many more present. 



"THERMIDOR" 359 

easily cut loose later by a handful of friends. They were 
surrounded by the Commune vigorous and creating 
vigour : without, an increasing crowd seemed to support 
them, and the Commune still gathered. One would 
have said in this first hour of the night that the Revolt 
was on the march and already victorious. But with 
Robespierre himself, their standard of whom they knew 
so little, there had come in upon them the paralysis that 
arises from thought. The organisation ceased, the orders 
failed, his signature was wanting and remained wanting. 

There is not in the whole five years a moment in 
which the man appears more nakedly than in this night 
which was his last. His unalterable principle, his failure 
in the face of things, his fixed purpose in morals, his 
final irresolution in action are the master-keys that read 
him. For four hours he stopped the advance of time 
with debate, disputing the strict right of insurrection, 
doubting it, demanding persuasion. In the heat of de- 
spair, of violent appeals, and almost of commands to their 
own king, time raced by these men for whom time was 
everything; the hours went furiously on, uselessly, like 
an unharnessed river. 

But in the Convention that same tide of time flow- 
ing was harnessed and ground out action in a great mill 
tUl every pulse of it produced a decision and completed 
a force. 

They outlawed the municipality, Hanriot, at last the 
five members themselves. Legendre found wisdom in 
the stress, went with a knot of guards and shut the 
Jacobins where active Vivier was still in the chair ; 
arrested him. The Convention named leaders for an 
armed force. They sent throughout the dark streets 
and to each of the ill-attended, yawning sections a decree 
to rouse and decide them ; they caused to be read at 
the crossways and shouted by criers their terrible " Hors 
la Loi!" which has been like the bell of the plague 



36o ROBESPIERRE 

throughout French history and which Buonaparte alone 
survived. 

The men in the Hotel de Ville heard it. At the 
extreme corner of the Grfeve where the old Rue de la 
Vannerie then came in, the outposts of the Convention 
had lit torches and were trumpeting it out on the stroke 
of twelve to the mob in the square : conquering their 
irresolution; deciding them. The tocsin had ceased. 
There was a silence in the great room among the rebels 
to hear the criers; some one ran out and seized them, 
but it was too late, the crowd was shaken, no gun-crew 
was formed. Then as though to mark the silence and to 
proclaim doom the tenuous chimes of midnight tinkled 
from the clocks of the Boucherie, of the Cathedral, and 
of St. Jean; the 9th Thermidor had ended and the loth 
rolled in the end. 

The air had been very still in the unnatural heat of 
the night, but the first breezes before rain stirred with 
the turn of morning, and upon the silence which nothing 
had yet disturbed, save the subdued debate of the 
crowd, the occasional rallying cry of Hanriot from the 
windows or the sudden shout of the " Hors la Loi" 
thunder broke. Revealed in sharp flashes, driven by 
the terror of the storm, the doubters poured off home 
under the sheets of rain. Some hauled away their 
pieces, some abandoned them, until in the second hour 
of the morning, when the thunder had rolled off along 
the river-plain and the rain withdrawn had refreshed 
the city with a new air, there remained but a group 
here and there gazing to no purpose at the windows, 
and the half-deserted guns : twin shadows, men and 
cannon reflected in the pools of the pavement. 

Within, the wiser men had already despaired ; but the 
more determined still wrestled with the man in whose 
quarrel, as they thought, they had challenged death. 
The wiser called for arms and had them piled upon the 



"THERMIDOR" 361 

table of the inner room ; the more determined summoned 
Robespierre for the last time. He sat at the centre of 
the great baize table, enthroned, as it were, having on his 
left the mayor, on his right Pay an, and before him the 
document all signed by his defenders and awaiting his 
name ; the last arm of the defence at bay. 

For the appeal to the sections had failed, the messen- 
gers had returned to report only confusion, and the Com- 
mune bethought them of one section at least to which 
the mere name of Robespierre should be a shaft of leader- 
ship. The grave relic of Mansard which we call the Place 
Vendome and in which the bronze pillar of Napoleon 
recalls at once in its majesty the embodiment of the 
Revolution in arms and in the marks of its fall the 
modern parody of insurrection, was a section under 
the name of " the Pikes." Therein Robespierre had lived 
and to this the last appeal was made. It was written 
out by Lerebours who alone survived of all that company ; 
Payan, Louvet, Legrand had put their names to it — they 
laid it before Robespierre. He held the pen doubtfully 
and would not sign. A final urging disturbed him but failed 
to startle him into action. It proceeded from Couthon. 

The cripple with large painful eyes came to him, like 
a reminiscence of his past four months of power ; a man 
upon whose fevered debility far more than upon the 
creative angers of St. Just Robespierre had been able to 
impress the sanctity of his system. 

Couthon then, just released from prison, came in on 
the arms of two gensdarmes. It was past one o'clock; 
the columns of the Convention were on the road to 
the assault, there was not an hour left in which to 
decide. When Robespierre had thanked the men that 
supported his friend, and while his mind was yet moved 
by the reunion of the proscribed, .Couthon added his 
plea to all that St. Just had said more passionately 
and to the hard phrases of Le Bas. 



362 ROBESPIERRE 

For half-an-hour or more he bore tlie scene, the 
crowd of men standing and crying against his principle ; 
then slowly, with the half irresolution which had mi- 
dermined him throughout that night he traced the 
first letters of his name. He saw forming, in this aban- 
donment of all himself, the first signature that ever he 
had put to rebellion ; an insult to his single dogma and 
a denial of the general will ; he dared not achieve the 
sacrilege. With that beginning he ended ; he refused to 
complete the signature, and putting down the pen, he 
laid his head on his left hand and stared at the paper 
before him. The clock on the facade struck two. 

The scene was over. Whether he had signed or no, 
nothing would have come of it save an abdication of the 
close consistency of his life. Time, which he had refused 
to consider, now overwhelmed him. Already the two slow 
mobs that the Convention had gathered were converging 
on the Place de Grfeve ; Barras from the Quays, Leonard 
Bourdon from the markets had met and joined their 
forces in front of the Hotel de Ville. No cannon opposed 
them. If Hanriot ran out to rally a dozen gunners 
it led to nothing but his own rough handling ; he broke 
away covered with wounds, ran through the archway and 
hid in the inner yard of the Town Hall. The last 
remaining cannon of the defence were mingled with 
those of the assailants and turned against the building. 
Leonard Bourdon and his following crowded up the great 
central staircase and the Commune had fallen. 

From the windows of the main hall on the first floor 
Le Bas had seen the troops of the Convention fill the 
square. He walked into the small room adjoining, took 
a loaded pistol, shot himself and fell dead. With the 
first light his enemies took him out and buried this 
soldierly, unlaughing man side by side with Rabelais in 
the damp narrow yard of the St. Paul. The shot began 
what was for some a panic, for the rest a stupefaction. 



"THERMIDOR" 363 

Augustine, never worthy or decided, leapt out upon the 
cornice of the fayade, stood for a moment above the crowd 
and then dashed himself down upon the steps of the great 
porch. They picked him up yet living and carried him 
into the lodge. Lescot stood suddenly up and made a 
movement as though to defend his leader, but he had done 
no more than rise when the end came. 

For as Robespierre still sat motionless, his elbow on the 
arm of his chair, his face turned downward and a little 
away from the door, a boy of nineteen ran up the stair 
before the rest and stood in the entry. It was Merda. 
Leonard Bourdon followed close behind; but before a 
sign or an order could be given Merda had raised his 
pistol and fired.^ Struck full in the face, his jaw shattered 
and his blood breaking over the document before him 
Robespierre fell down ; St. Just that had stood by all the 
while, receiving the inevitable with great dignity and 
silence, knelt on one knee beside him and tried to 
staunch the wound. Then in a scene whose details 
have remained to us but whose impression is but a huge 
confusion, the conquerors poured in and occupied the 
room with numbers. 



To this, which was the true end of his life, little 
should be added. The long hours that remained to him 
were but a confused lethargy ; dull pain, the loss of blood, 
long fasting, lack of sleep drained his life dry before the 
guillotine could claim it. 

They took him on a stretcher to the Tuileries where 
all the prisoners were gathered, and, in the room of 
the Pavilion Marsan where he had supped the night 
before they laid him upon the table, giving him for a 
pillow a deal box, and some one handed him a pistol-case 

^ See Note II. at the end of this book. 



364 ROBESPIERRE 

of cloth with which from time to time he feehly tried 
to wipe the blood from his face. 

When the sun had already risen they sent doctors to 
him, who, probing his mouth and taking from it his 
broken teeth, yet drew no sound from him nor any 
gesture. Only his eyes, which remained bright, were 
fixed upon them all the while Hke those of an animal 
wounded. They bound his jaw with bandages and left 
him so, for chance visitors to stare at all the long morn- 
ing ; and St. Just sat by his side, his eyes red and swollen 
perhaps from weeping, certainly from vigil. 

During those five interminable hours Robespierre 
neither moaned nor mumbled a broken word, but lay 
quite silent, though at rare intervals the guards jested 
about him and his wound and his coming fate. But 
to this silence there was one exception, for as he attempted 
to reach his garter, which cramped and numbed his 
leg, an assistant, kinder than the rest, stepped forward and 
loosened it for him. Then Robespierre whispered in- 
distinctly with his swollen lips, " Thank you, sir." ^ 
Equality was dying. 

It was long before noon when the prisoners were 
taken away to the conciergerie ; formalities of a certain 
length, the reunion of the other outlaws, the identifica- 
tion of each consumed the day, and it was not till past 
five of the summer afternoon that the tumbrils rolled 
out of the great gates of wrought iron, 

A long and useless agony marked the road to the 
guillotine. So slowly went the carts, and with such 
frequent shocks and stoppages from the dense crowd, 
that the bare two miles of road took up nearly as many 
hours. On the Quai des Lunettes, where his familiar 
custom had half-endeared him to the stalls, the opticians 
and their workers saw him go by, and raised no cries. 
In the Rue St. Denis, the Rue de la Ferronerie, past the 

^ This man told it to Petiet, who told it to Michelet. 



"THERMIDOR" 365 

Markets, crowded windows and the reappearance of a 
luxurious world proclaimed the reaction ; but especially 
in the Rue St. Honore all that society which, since 
the victories, was reconquering France, made a parade 
of enthusiasm — and the people echoed it. 

They say that at the western end the soldiers who 
had lined the whole way could not restrain the flood 
of the mob ; the house fronts were filled ; there were 
flowers and ceaseless acclamations. To one the Terror, 
to another unclean equality, to another madness, to 
another the Republic, to yet another the threat of 
punishment seemed to be passing in the tumbril. But 
as a fact it was only Robespierre. 

He hung limp and exsanguine from the cords that 
bound him to the cart ; hatless, his stock lost, his light- 
blue coat dimmed with the accumulations of the night 
and the dust of prisons, his white nankeen short-hose 
muddy and splashed with blood, his head loose at the 
neck ; he looked like a man swooning. 

It is not right to watch him thus, for the man had 
passed. I will not describe the end. Perhaps Carrier 
shouted behind the cart, perhaps they played some 
bacchanalian thing before the empty house of Duplay, 
perhaps a woman struck him in the Rue Royale. In 
the great square to which the guillotine had returned 
for this last sacrifice, the twenty-two were poured out in 
expiation, Robespierre the last. He gave, as they 
loosened his bandage, a loud cry of pain. The axe fell, 
and powder shook from his hair. 



Political effort in its supreme achievements or 
despairs creates a certain illusion. Matters of a moment 
pass for things eternal. A mere battle, a single crime, 
are thought, as they stand up against and terrify the 
eager mind, to have arrested in some manner the slow 



266 ROBESPIERRE 

purpose of God. So it was with this high combing of 
the revolutionary wave. 

It was imag^ined at the death of this man that the 
West would abandon or attempt with an ever-diminishing 
energy the solution of that awful problem of political 
freedom whose complexity he had himself so little 
seized. A relief ran through the kings ; the rich began 
to draw breath carelessly. It was thought that the 
Republic, which had certainly suffered madness, would 
leave no more effect than attaches to the memory of 
evil dreams. 

Whatever instinct or demand had surged up from 
the blind depths and origins of mankind, that primal 
appetite had, it was thought, sunk back into its antique 
repose. 

But it is not so lightly, nor in so immediate a fashion 
that change can be provoked in the development of a 
civilisation. The universal reaction which men awaited 
could find no stuff; the theories counter to democracy no 
new philosophy in the mere falling of a sharp steel. 
To-day through the wide perplexities of a world ten- 
fold his own, the central thought, to which this man 
was registrar and whose propagation he imagined to be 
his mission, has reappeared to lead us through unknown 
dangers to unknown destinies ; for we are certainly on 
the threshold of the Republic. 

In closing this book, I turn again to himself. I 
remember his grave for a moment. His bones, buried in 
a vague field of the suburbs, forgotten beneath the 
dancing-floor of a common hall, were insulted for twenty 
years till they were disturbed by the pickaxe in the 
driving of a road for the rich, and no one knows where 
they lie. 

I return also to the memory of the jejune, persistent 
mind which has haunted me throughout the description 
of his fortunes. I fear to have done him a wrong. 



"THERMIDOR" 367 

SucL. men may be greater within tlian their phrases or 
their vain acts display them. I know that he passed 
through a furnace of which our paltry time can re- 
imagine nothing, and I know that throughout this trial he 
affirmed — with monotonous inefficiency, but still affirmed 
— the fundamental truths which our decadence has 
neglected or despised, and is even in some dens beginning 
to deny. 

He saw God Personal, the soul immortal, men of a 
kind with men, and he was in the company of those who 
began to free the world. God have mercy on his soul 
and on each of ours, who hope for better things. 



NOTES 



NOTE I 

ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE "MEMOIRS OF 
CHAELOTTE ROBESPIERRE" 

Throughout the second chapter of this book I have used the 
" Memoirs of Charlotte Kobespierre," and as their authenticity has 
been doubted, I would explain at some length how the doubt has 
arisen, and upon what grounds I have taken them to be genuine. 
It is a matter of great importance to such a study as this, because 
the character of Robespierre can only be read in the light of his 
boyhood and youth, and of that time we have no full record save 
that of his sister. 

The history of the " Memoirs " is this. A young revolutionary 
of 1830 published after the death of Mademoiselle Robespierre 
(or " de Robespierre," as she preferred to be called) a book which 
did not purport to be entirely from her hand, but was his edition of 
the numerous notes which she had left for the use of history, and 
which, he said, had been handed to him by her executrix, Mdlle. 
Mathon. 

The principal authority for regarding the " Memoirs " as 
spurious is a certain Croker, who was, in the earlier part of this 
century, an historian, and an ardent critic of, the Revolution. 
His fortune enabled him to make a very valuable collection of 
revolutionary pamphlets and material, the greater part of which 
is now in the British Museum ; and so great was his reputation 
during his lifetime that he was offered some prodigious sum (I 
forget how many thousand pounds) by one of the principal pub- 
lishing firms of this country (I forget which) to write a history of 
the Revolution. 

By that process of copying which is the curse of history, his 

368 



NOTES 369 

opinion upon these " Memoirs " has been so often repeated as to 
acquire a certain fixity. Yet, if his original criticism be examined, 
it will be discovered that he had no better ground for it than 
political bias. 

It would be an impertinence upon my part to attack the great 
authority of Mr. Morse-Stephens, who is without question the 
only Englishman thoroughly acquainted with the history of the 
Revolution, and whose admirable work, the product of an Oxford 
leisure, has received its reward in an American endowment ; but 
Mr. Morse-Stephens will not, I think, deny that in this case he 
has merely followed the authority of Croker, for on reading 
Croker's MS. notes in the British Museum, I found upon the 
fly-leaf of the volume Mr, Morse-Stephens' name, and I presume 
that the book was once his property. 

Now the argument in favour of accepting the authenticity of 
these " Memoirs " is simply the argument in favour of accepting 
the authenticity of any book that may be presented to you until 
some conclusive evidence of chicanery or forgery can be produced. 
If indeed the book had been published as proceeding entirely 
from Charlotte Robespierre's own hand, then one would have 
grave suspicions of the honesty of its publication, for she was 
not in the habit of long consecutive literary composition, and 
some parts of the style are evidently those of another hand ; but 
since the book was not offered under any such guise, but frankly 
edited as the compilation and working together of her notes by 
another, there can be no question of false motive in the matter, 
and any one desiring to suggest that the relations given in them 
were not from her pen would have to prove one of three things — 
either, first, that Charlotte was of a character quite different from 
that which the author of these " Memoirs " betrays ; or, secondly, 
that Laperronaye was so untrustworthy a man that anything pro- 
ceeding from him was open to suspicion ; or finally (and this 
would be the best proof of all), that in some one important part 
of the "Memoirs" a statement demonstrably untrue, and one 
which Charlotte and he must have known to be untrue, is made. 

None of these three proofs against the authenticity of the 
" Memoirs " or against their veracity exists. 

Charlotte's character is perfectly well known. She had many 
acquaintances throughout her long life, and the Lebas family (who 

3 4 



370 NOTES 

were her most intimate friends, and who occupied an honourable 
position in the society of the University as late as the third 
empire) have been able to give as clear and consecutive an 
account of her character in her age, as the private letters and 
memoirs of the Revolution give it of her youth. She was some- 
what bitter and jealous ; reserved ; a little vain (there was even 
some talk of a courtship with Fouche !) ; strongly attached to her 
brother, and not particularly political. She could have no kind 
of motive in making him out this or that save the motive of 
domestic affection, which would, of course, prevent her from 
including the less favourable anecdotes that might attach to his 
youth, but which would not affect the neutral matter of which 
the " Memoirs " are principally composed. In a word, she was 
exactly the woniRU whom one would expect to leave the notes 
which she did leave ; they contain not a few allusions to her 
quarrels with those whom she feared were acquiring too great a 
domestic influence over her brother, and in all of them she dis- 
covers herself to be precisely what the tradition of her character 
would make her. 

Laperronaye's character is also well known ; he was a young 
and enthusiastic radical, who more than once suffered at the 
hands of the Restoration for his political opinions. He was, 
as such enthusiasts must of their nature be, a simple man, 
and while his own relation of political events would almost 
certainly be exaggerated and biassed, such a cold forgery as 
Croker suggests (a forgery requiring, moreover, an intimate know- 
ledge of human nature, a great self-restraint, and a vast reading) 
is utterly alien to such a type of mind. 

As to the third method, the discovery in these " Memoirs " of 
a definite falsehood, I will treat of in a moment. Meanwhile let 
me examine the methods which Croker used in his analysis 
of the book. 

He wrote an article in the Quarterly Review, a periodical at 
that time remarkable for its ability in attack, professing to review 
this with other memoirs that had been sent him by the editor, 
and he proceeds to the satisfaction of the middle class of his 
time, but certainly to the satisfaction of no historian, to demolish 
the authenticity of Charlotte's notes in the following fashion : — 

In the first place he impugns the morality of the publisher. 



NOTES 371 

He does not impugn it by saying this publisher upon such and 
such an occasion was guilty of such and such a trick, or -wittingly 
foisted such and such a forgery upon the public, he simply says : — 

" In England the assertion of any man of letters or of any 
respectable publisher that a work was printed from the MSS. of 
a person lately deceased, would never be questioned — we regret 
to repeat that it is quite the reverse in France." 

It is difficult to see why Croker was at the paius of going 
further. If French publishers are notorious rogues, it is evident 
that any book proceeding from a French firm lies under grave 
suspicion, and the onus jprohandi in the matter of its genuineness 
lies upon the firm that has the temerity to issue the book. 
According to this theory it would be necessary for every French 
publisher to issue as a preface to all posthumous and most con- 
temporary works a complete and exhaustive proof that in each 
particular case he had acted honestly. 

But though this assertion of Croker's (had he seriously in- 
tended to propound it dogmatically), would have been sufficient 
for his whole argument, he has the grace to go into a little more 
detail, and attacks the honesty of Laperronaye. The basis of 
his distrust of Laperronaye is that Laperronaye was a radical, 
and was prosecuted by the Government for his political opinion. 
There is not a single atom of proof produced by Croker to show 
that Laperronaye was a dishonest man, saving the fact that he 
was a radical and that he suiTered such prosecution. I will 
admit that I ' >und it a trifle disconcerting to discover that some 
men regard as criminals all young liberals who live by lecturing 
and their pen. He does not say, " Laperronaye once forged this 
or that," nor does he even bring forward what is usually easy to 
bring forward in the case of violent politicians, examples of his 
exaggeration or misstatements ; he simply says that Englishmen 
will always look with suspicion upon those who are prosecuted 
by monarchic or oligarchic governments for their political opinions. 
A postulate so puerile, and one so destructive to the credit of the 
whole English historical school, would seem incredible did not 
one know the kind of man who was writing and the kind of 
audience for which he wrote ; nevertheless it is the only argu- 
ment this astonishing man brings forward to destroy the value 
of Laperronaye's edition, so far as its author is concerned. 



372 NOTES 

I turn now to the more serious part of his argument : the 
part in which he attempts to prove special points in order to establish 
his view. I give them in their order, and I think my readers will 
admit that they are not particularly convincing. 

Pirst he says that Laperronaye could not have had the 
" Memoirs " because Mdlle. de Robespierre's whole property was 
left in her will to her host and friend Mdlle. Mathon. The ab 
surdity of this should be evident on the face of it. People 
bequeath their literary property every day to those who will have 
to call in aid for its editing and publication. But it becomes still 
more absurd when one knows, what Croker apparently did not, but 
what at that time many living men could have told him, that 
Laperronaye was an intimate friend of the house, that he was in 
continual conference with Mdlle. de Robespierre, and that Mdlle. 
Mathon made no protest against the appearance of the book. 

Secondly, he complains that the style is in many parts " con- 
tinually smelling of the three great days" of 1830, "no more like 
what a poor old recluse would have hammered out than it is to 
Marot or Rabelais." This is rank nonsense. If he is alluding to 
the phrases that proceeded from Laperronaye's own pen, of course 
they smell of 1830, just as this book which I have written smells, 
or at least I hope it smells, of the year 1901. But if he is 
alluding to the phrases which are supposed to proceed from 
Mdlle. de Robespierre herself and to form parts of her notes, I 
can only say that it is utterly unfounded. It is not very easy to 
distinguish the slight differences of style that arise in the lifetime 
of one person. Mdlle. de Robespierre may have kept strictly in 
her old age to the phrases of 1793, or she may have, as most 
people do, altered a little with the time ; but the simple words 
in which her brother's youth is noted down belong to no par- 
ticular kind of modern French style. They are perfectly straight- 
forward and plain. There is not an expert in the world that 
could decide from the words or their order at what time between 
1760 and 1840 they may have been written. 

Thirdly, he says that her age (she was over seventy) "was 
rather late to set about writing memoirs." This again is non- 
sense. I repeat, the book does not profess to be of Mdlle. 
Robespierre's own composition ; it professes only to be an editing 
and putting together of a mass of notes which she had jotted 



NOTES 373 

down in the course of a great number of years, and Croker's 
contention that the mention of Levasseur's " Memoirs " (a book 
that only appeared in 1829) proves the book a forgery, has not the 
least weight, since there is no reason that a woman over sixty 
should not take note of the literature of her time. If some 
elderly English lady were now leaving a number of notes 
of, let us say, the Indian Mutiny (which is further from us 
than the Revolution was from 1829), it is ridiculous to imagine 
that she would be incapable of noting some important book upon 
the subject which had appeared this year, and which seemed to 
her to be libellous or false in connection with the character of 
some actor in that episode whose reputation she had at heart. 

Fourthly, he makes great case of Robespierre's being spoken 
of as belonging to two successive parliaments, and calls this "a 
slip of Laperronaye's youthful memory." This again is absolutely 
puerile. Whether the inaccurate phrase is Laperronaye's or Mdlle. 
de Robespierre's is immaterial, it is just such an error as would 
never appear in a forgery, and as would appear in rough authentic 
notes jotted down from memory. Every child in a French 
school knows that Robespierre was not a member of the second, 
but only of the first and third parliaments of the Revolution ; 
Mdlle. de Robespierre knew it, and Laperronaye knew it as well 
as Croker (for instance) would know that the short peace of 
Amiens interrupted the Great War, of which one nevertheless 
talks and writes as a continuous struggle of twenty-two years. 

It is evident that upon such arguments as the above one could 
prove any authority in the world to be doubtful, but there is in the 
■whole of this long article just one clear bit of evidence, and only 
one, and as might be expected it goes against Croker's contention. 
He speaks of the letter upon p. 126 (of the i8th of Messidor of 
the year II.) as obviously false from the terms of recrimination in 
which it is written; it is an angry and almost passionate com- 
plaint against the way she is neglected. Croker asks whether 
it is possible to believe that such a letter would have been sent to 
Maximilian, "who was her brother's master and hers." 

It was published by Courtois (when that enemy officially 
edited the papers seized in Robespierre's house) as being addressed 
to Maximilian. On the face of it, it is improbable that Charlotte 
would have addressed such a letter to Maximilian, and Croker 



374 NOTES 

should have known that Courtois very often omitted matter in 
order to turn the collection against Eobespierre. He cannot be 
called a serious critic who accepts without verification anything 
which may tend to support his one theory, yet this is just what 
Croker did. If Croker had looked up the original in the 
archives he would have found that the letter was not written to 
Maximilian but to Augustine ; it is he, her younger brother, 
whom Charlotte is reproaching for not visiting her on his return 
from the South, and we know that she had a standing quarrel 
with him which Eobespierre was always trying to settle. 

I think I have sufficiently shown that Croker is utterly 
unreliable, and as it is principally upon Croker's authority that 
doubts have been cast upon these " Memoirs " I think it will also 
be admitted that, until something more definite can be brought 
against them, the " Memoirs " must be taken as our principal source 
of information upon Robespierre's childhood and youth. I cannot 
refrain, however, from concluding by quoting a characteristic 
pencil note which Croker has himself added in the spirit of an 
exegi monumentum on the margin of his precious essay : — 

"/^ is now admitted,''^ he writes, "that the Quarterly Review 
was right, and that these ' Memoirs ' ivere a r/ross fabrication, but if 
it had not been for this exposure they might still have passed for 
authentic." 

There, in a nutshell, is the spirit which always runs through 
this kind of falsification of history. A writer, popular for some 
momentary reason, develops a long process of reasoning upon 
certain postulates which he affirms with commendable vigour, 
but which he does not himself take the trouble to prove. B, C, 
and D, eminent and reliable men who have heard that A is an 
authority, and who are writing upon some cognate subject, come 
across this point ; they have no time to look up the whole of the 
authorities ; they turn to an index and they discover that the 
only man who has treated of it is A. They run rapidly through 
his conclusions and admit them into their own narratives. Their 
work, since it is valuable upon any matter which they have 
examined, is read by the general public ; the single point so 
quoted is accepted with the rest, and at last the false conclusion 
arrived at by one charlatan in this one matter is perpetuated on 
the well-founded authority of a dozen honest man with whose 
labours it is intermixed. 



NOTES 375 

NOTE II 

ON CERTAIN SITES MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK 

There will perhaps be among my readers a certain number 
who are familiar with modern Paris, and I take it that they will 
find some interest in the discovery of the exact sites mentioned in 
this book. The original buildings have nearly all disappeared; 
their emplacements, however, are worth tracing. 

The Jacobins. — The Dominican Convent of the Eue St. 
Honor^, in whose chapter or refectory the club originally met, 
in whose library they held their sessions until May '91, and in 
whose chapel they sat for the remaining three years of their 
activity, stood exactly where the covered market called "The 
March^ St. Honor6 " stands now. Indeed, that market was 
created by the Convention in a decree purposely designed to 
obliterate the memory of the famous hall. The entrance to the 
club, three arches surmounted by statues of St. Dominic and 
St. Catherine of Sienna, was almost yard for yard in that part of 
the northern side of the Rue St. Honore where the " Rue du 
March6 St. Honor^ " now comes into it. Of the original build- 
ings nothing remains. 

Duplay's House. — This house stood upon the site of the 
modern No. 398 of the Rue St. Honors. It is on the northern 
side of that street, about a hundred yards before you get to the 
Rue Royale, and just before the opening of the Rue St. Florentin. 
The house may be recognised, apart from the number, as that on 
either side of whose central doorway stand a jeweller's shop and 
a furniture shop. It is the property of M. Vaury, whose bakery 
is next door. 

There has arisen upon the origin of the present building a 
discussion which once possessed a certain interest, but the solu- 
tion of which is now so thoroughly arrived at that the quarrel 
may be almost neglected. It will suffice for this note if I say 
that without doubt not a particle of the original building remains, 
but, save that the front upon the street is a good deal deeper than 
it was originally, the plan of the house is much what it was in 
Robespierre's time. 



376 NOTES 

This house was, during the Revolution, of comparatively slight 
construction; it was only two storeys high in front, and with a depth 
of one room. The back, at the end of a courtyard, was also only 
two storeys high ; and the back and front were joined precisely as 
they are now by a wing on the western side — that is, on the left 
side of the courtyard as you come in under the gate ; but there 
was no corresponding eastern wing opposite as there is now, there 
was only a blank wall. In the years 1811 and 18 16 two succes- 
sive reconstructions destroyed all the original walls, and there 
were even new foundations laid ; it was determined to make the 
house much higher, and the walls of the original two storeys were, 
according to the architect's report, not nearly strong enough to 
bear the weight. Tliey were pulled down, the present house was 
raised to its six storeys, and the eastern wing was added. The 
carpenter's shed that stood in the courtyard was at the same time 
taken away. 

M. Sardou, who possesses a very valuable collection of revolu- 
tionary MSS. and documents, was under the impression that the 
house we now see is the original building. It is true that the 
actual space of Robespierre's room still exists surrounded by four 
walls, and that the place where the old window was is occupied by 
the present window overlooking the courtyard. It is the middle 
window on the left on the first floor ; but the discussion as to 
whether the room is still in existence is a matter for metaphy- 
sicians rather than historians. When you have taken away the 
floor, the ceiling, and the four walls of a room, and in the new 
house you reproduce on much the same situation a new set of 
walls, floor, and ceiling, have you still got the original room? 
The discussion is a trifle scholastic. 

The House in the Rue Saintonge. — This house, where Robes- 
pierre lived for two years before he became the guest of the 
Duplays, stiU exists, and bears the number 64. There is nothing 
about it very well worth remarking, and it is impossible to be 
quite certain which rooms he occupied. 

The Manege, in which most of the time of the Constituent 
Assembly was spent, all that of the Legislative Assembly, and 
that of the Convention up to May 1793, has been destroyed by 
the construction of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Castiglione. 
Its site would lie mainly in the roadway, but would partly over- 



NOTES 377 

lap the Bodega at the western corner, and to a mnch greater 
extent the row of shops at the eastern corner. There is a certain 
irony in the connection of such modern uses — a drinking har 
for the foreign rich and a dressmaker for the foreign rich — with 
such a past. The principal approach to it was down a narrow 
lane called "Passage des Feuillants," which ran more or less in 
the centre of what is now the Rue Castiglione. 

The Hotel de Ville was, of course, destroyed in the Inter- 
nationalist and CoUectivist revolt of 187 1. The great central hall 
on the first floor occupies space for space very much the same site 
as the hall in which the principal meetings of the Commune were 
held, and in which Eobeapierre was arrested and wounded on the 
morning of the loth Thermidor. The great square in front of it 
(once the Place de Greve, now the Place de I'Hotel de Ville) is 
much larger than it was in the time of the Revolution ; it was 
then irregular, rather triangular than square in shape, and barely 
more than half its present size. 

Finally, if such a detail can interest the curious, I may remark 
that the guillotine of Thermidor stood very near where the Obelisk 
is now in the Place de la Concorde, a few yards to the north and 
west of it. On the site of the Obelisk was the great statue of 
Liberty which David had designed. 



NOTE III 

EOBESPIEERE'S SUPPOSED ATTEMPT AT SUICIDE 

It is not without interest to attempt to determine whether or 
no Robespierre attempted suicide on the morning of the loth 
Thermidor in the Hotel de Ville. That pistol-shot was, as I have 
said in the text, practically the end of his life, for he lay but half 
living and bloodless for the remaining hours of the day until his 
execution in the evening. It is also of great interest from the 
point of view of an analysis of his character. So important has the 
question appeared to historians that one may almost know in what 
category a writer on the Revolution is to be placed by noting his 
treatment of the doubt upon Robespierre's wound. 



378 NOTES 

M. Aulard has well said that there is no absolute certainty to 
be arrived at in the matter, and he himself, by far the greatest 
living authority on the Revolution, has refused to decide. Never- 
theless when I remember that history, which can always make 
sure of moral tendencies, can never be absolutely sure of facts, 
and that the evidence it secures is by its nature of a kind that 
would not be admitted in a court of law, I think the question 
of Robespierre's supposed attempt at suicide can be solved with 
at least as much confidence as a dozen cou temporary doubts upon 
which it has been agreed to accept a final decision. 

I take it that Robespierre did not shoot himself, but that his 
wound was inflicted by Merda, shooting, as he says he did, from 
the door, and I think the following process of proof lends to that 
opinion a weight which no generalities upon Robespierre's char- 
acter can possibly outweigh. 

Here is a list of the documents which have decided opinion 
upon either side. 

First and most important the report of the doctors sent by the 
Convention to examine the wound when Robespierre lay bleeding 
on the table in the Tuileries. 

Secondly, the declaration of Dulac which asserts, a year later, 
that he saw Robespierre extended by the table before any one 
came in, before, that is, the troops of the Convention had thrust 
open the door. 

Thirdly, Gallois distinctly states that Merda fired at Couthon 
and missed him, and that Robespierre had laid by his side before 
the irruption of the troops of the Convention, a pistol and its 
case brought in from the selection of arms in the adjoining room. 
It was with this pistol-case of soft leather, says Gallois, that 
Robespierre was wiping his wound during the long hours of his 
agony in the Tuileries. 

Lastly, there is the declaration of Merda himself, made some 
little time afterwards, that he shot at Couthon and missed him, 
and that he then shot Robespierre, and with this declaration is a 
mass of the most evident nonsense, such as that he leapt at 
Robespierre with a great sword, and pointing it at his throat 
said, "There is a God." 

There are one or two other declarations of less importance, 
but I omit them because they are either absolutely irreconcilable 
with the facts, or at third hand. 



NOTES 379 

Now it is evident that our judgment reposes upon two very 
different kinds of evidence. First, we have the testimony of men 
more or less concerned to obtain favours from the victors or to 
defend the memory of the victims, and tending, therefore, to give 
a particular version of their own. Secondly, we have a quasi- 
scientific document into which there could be no object for 
introducing support of one thewy or of the other. It is evident 
from the mere aspect of the doctors' report that it was written 
hurriedly, and from its terms that it purports to be nothing but 
a short, rather conventional and confused statement of the nature 
of the wound drawn up in technical language. 

It so happens that nearly all the judgments upon that famous 
pistol-shot have been based upon the contradictory evidence of the 
first category, while the document, which, so far as I can see, is 
obviously more reliable, has been more or less neglected. 

If one takes the personal evidence offered, one comes to some 
such tangle as this : the shot was said to have been fired by a 
hearty and irresponsible boy,^ who had the greatest interest in 
making up the story. On the other hand, Bourdon, who was there, 
backed up his claim to a reward. He also claimed and got back 
his pistol from the Hotel de Ville where it had fallen. He was 
known to have held a pistol as he entered the door, and he fired 
at least at Couthon. He wove into his declaration the wildest 
gasconading, and instead of making it on the spot, he waited 
until the next day to appeal for a reward. Against this you have 
the testimony of a man far more reliable, an employ^ in the Town 
Hall, who a year later testifies that he saw Eobespierre lying 
upon the floor before this boy and his armed companions entered 
the room. It is plain that on evidence like that no one can make 
up their mind either way, and the only result of it is that while 
the more romantic of historians have inclined to accept Merda's 
version, it is the more precise who have defended the theory of 
suicide. 

This latter conclusion is, however, rendered untenable, I think, 

* I hope this liar and hard fighter was of Gascon blood ; but it is im- 
possible to say so definitely, though he was certainly southern. He was 
born in 1774, joined the army after Thermidor, was promoted from the 
ranks and died from wounds received at the Beresina, 8th September 
18 1 2. He was colonel of the ist Chasseurs at the time. 



38o NOTES 

by the evidence of the doctors' report. We know that Robespierre 
had been sitting in a kind of silent despair for some time, with his 
left elbow upon the table, his forehead leaning upon his left hand, 
the right side of his face towards the great window, and the left 
side of it towards the door. Now we find from the doctors' 
report, though that report is rather confused (as Dr. E^clus has 
well pointed out), that the general direction of the wound was 
from the lower part of the left cheek near the nose downwards, 
shattering the lower left jaw and passing out apparently at the 
back of the neck, for no bullet was found in the wound. There was 
no mark of burning or of powder on the skin. The wound was 
small and clean, and there is no doubt that the bullet was con- 
siderably deflected by the bone. The reader has only to put his 
own right hand into the awkward position required to inflict such 
a wound upon himself — if indeed it be possible — to appreciate 
the extreme improbability of a man's turning a weapon against 
himself in such a contorted gesture ; especially if this were done 
in a moment of excitement. If the shot was really fired by 
Merda, everything is explained. Coming from the whole length 
of a very large public ofiice, it was more or less spent, and hence 
the deflection at the bone. The wound was small and clean, 
which it certainly would not have been coming from a weapon an 
inch or two from the face, and finally, that there should be no 
mark of burning or powder upon the skin, seems to me con- 
clusive. 



THB END 



INDEX 



" A," names of Jacobins under, 194 

Abbey of St. Waast, 42-43 ; gives 
scholarship to Robespierre, 51 ; 
de Rohan abbot of, 112; Robes- 
pierre revisits, 156 

Academy, of Arras, 56-57 ; Carnot 
received in, Due de Guines a 
guest of, 65 ; of Metz, Robes- 
pierre's prize from, 58 ; of 
Amiens, failure of Robespierre to 
obtain prize of, 59, 60 

Actors, debate on, 99 

Aix, Archbishop of, Robespierre 
replies to, 79 ; his protest on 
Civil Constitution, 115 

Allemand, Royal regiment, desert, 
185 

Alliance, of Austria and Prussia, 
168-169 

Alsace, claims of feudal lords in, 

174 
Amar, mentioned, 258, 264 

Amaury, Cafe, site of Breton club, 

80 
Americans, at bar of National 

Assembly, 109; resemblance of 

Isnard to, 161 
Ancien regime, Robespierre typical 

of, 13 ; spirit of, 14; contrasts of, 

21 ; literary influence in, 56 ; 

anti-Catholicism of, 1 1 2-1 1 3 
Anglas, Boissy d', see " Boissy " 
Antoinette, see "Marie" 
Apostacy, of priests, 280-281 
"Appeal to Artesian People," 

Robespierre's first pamphlet, 66- 

67 



Arms, of Robespierre family 41, 
and n. 

Arras, described, 43-44; academy 
of. 56-57 ; College d', 51 ; Robes- 
pierre returns to, 53 ; elections 
in, 67 ; Robespierre revisits, 156; 
anger of, against Roland, 217 

"Artesian People," see "Appeal" 

Artois, province of, described, 42- 
44 ; debate on taxes of, 100, 107 

Artois, Comte d', emigrates, 84 

Assembly, see " National," " Legis- 
lative " 

Audebrand, senator, his anecdote 
of Mile. Robespierre, 49 n. 

August, loth of, attack on palace, 
described, 188-192; general ef- 
fect of, 193-195, 207 ; effect of, 
on Robespierre, 195-197 ; medal 
commemorating, 199 

Augustine Robespierre, youngest 
of family, 49 ; scholarship at 
Louis le Grand, 53 ; his death, 

363 

Aulard, quoted, 80 n., 192 n. ; 
criticised, 96 n. 

Austria, see " Emperor " 

Avignon, massacres at, 154 ; Em- 
peror demands restoration of, 174 

Azema, deputy for Aude, his de- 
scription of loth of August, 190- 
192 



Baptism, of Robespierre, 46 
Barbaroux, attacks Robespierre, 
215 ; described, 234 n. 



2 B 



382 



INDEX 



Barnave, draws np letter for 

Emperor, 169, and n. 
Barr^re, his early notes on Robes- 
pierre, 75 ; attitude on 9th Ther- 
midor, 326 ; speeches on loth 
Thermidor, 342, 343 
Bastille, fall of, 83 ; Robespierre's 

comment on, 85 
Beaumetz, Robespierre's quarrel 

with, 107, and n. 
Besenval, case of, 90 
Bercheny, the colours at, 185 
Bethune, Robespierre visits, 157 
Beurnonville, Minister of War, 235 
Billaud-Varennes, Robespierre op- 
poses, 245 ; threatens Danton, 
286 ; attitude on 9th Thermidor 
327-328 ; his speech on loth 
Thermidor, 338-342 
Biron, defeat of, 185 
Birth, of Robespierre, 39 
Bishop, see under separate dioceses 

and names 
Bishops, their protest against Civil 

Constitution, 122-124 
Boissy d'Anglas, 323 
Bonaparte, see " Napoleon " 
"Bourdon," of Notre Dame, 338 
Bourdon, Leonard, occupies Hotel 
de Ville on loth Thermidor, 
362 
Boyhood, of Robespierre, 50-53 
Breton club, 80, 81 ; origin of 

Jacobins, 97 
Br^ze, de, Mirabeau's reply to, 82 
Briez, 264 

Brissot, at Desmoulins' wedding, 
124; his power in 1792, 115; 
person described, 166 ; quarrel 
with Robespierre, 168 ; forces 
war, 169; formation of Girondin 
ministry, 174-175, 181-183; prin- 
cipal debate against Robespierre, 
213-214 
Brittanique, Hotel, Rolands at, 212 
Brittany, in the Revolution, 80 



Buissart, Robespierre's letters to 

76 n., 82-84 "• 
Buonarotti, 303 



Cabaeeus, Theresa, Robespierre's 
warrant of arrest of, 59, 310 

Caen, Bishop of, see "Fauchet" 

Cahiers, abstract quality of edu- 
cated, 55 

Camille des Moulins, see "Des- 
moulins " 

Carnot, family of, 46-47 ; received 
in Academy of Arras, 57; briefs 
Robespierre, 63 

Carrault, Robespierre's mother, 45 

Carvin, settlement of Robespierre's 
family at, 40 ; they leave it for 
Arras, 42 

Catholicism, Robespierre's attitude 
towards, no ; and history of 
France, 1 1 i-i 12 ; and the schism, 

153-155 

Cavaignac, family of, 47 

Character of Robespierre, 12-18, 
27-38 

Charlotte Robespierre, 48, and n. ; 
49, and n. 

Chaumette, at King's trial, 221-222 

Church, Cambon proposed to dis- 
establish, 224 

Civil Constitution of clergy, 113- 
119; signed by King, 122 

Clergy, see "Civil." Marriage of, 
Robespierre's attitude to, 117 

College, of Arras, 51 ; of Louis le 
Grand, 51 ; Robespierre's life at, 
52 ; King visits, 53 

Committee of Public Safety, formed, 
243-244 ; Robespierre enters, 
256-257 ; requires continuation 
of Terror and drags in Robes- 
pierre, 293; Thermidor, 325- 

327 
Commons, election of, at Arras, 67 ; 
their oath in the tennis court, 81 ; 



INDEX 



383 



entry of, into Revolution, 106; 
and Mirabeau, 129 

Commune, of loth of August, 197- 
199 ; Robespierre identified with, 
208 ; of '94, no longer Parisian, 
319, 324 ; insurrection of, 355 et 
seq, 

Conde, question of, 119 

Condorcet, his view of Robespierre, 
219 

Conspiracy, the, against Robes- 
pierre, 323 

Constitution of 1791 ; its break- 
down, 146 

Contract, see " Social Contract " 

Convention, first meeting of, 209 

Conzie, de, bishop of Arras ; his 
patronage of Robespierre, 50-5 1 ; 
gives Robespierre a magistracy 

Cordeliers, club of, 289-290 ; Vieux, 
see " Vieux Cordelier" 

Oourrier de Paris, 219 

Court party, their attempt at re- 
action in October 1789, 91 

Cromwell, Lafayette compared to, 
182 

Crown, intrigues with the enemy, 
149, 169 ; a power of, in early 
part of war, 178 



Danton, family of, 46 ; his flight 
to England, 144, and n. ; his re- 
port from Belgium, 237 ; peril of 
in Dumouriez' treason, 242-243 ; 
returns to stop the Terror, 277- 
278 ; last interview with Robes- 
pierre, 292 ; death of, 296 

Dauphin, Robespierre's supposed 
allusion to, 108, and n. 

" De," see under separate names 

Debates, on Civil Constitution, 114- 
119; on the war, 161-164; on 
Robespierre's ascendancy, 212- 
217 ; of 9th Thermidor, 332-349 

Deity, Feast of, 309-310 



Desmoulins, Camille, at College 
with Robespierre, 52 ; rouses 
Paris in July 1789, 83; mar- 
riage of, 123-124 ; attack on 
Brissot, 158 ; Vieux Cordelier, 
278-286 

Dillon, General, his defeat and 
death, 184-185 

Dominicans, offer their convent to 
Radical club, 97 

Dubois-Cranc^, at siege of Lyons, 
267 ; abandons Robespierre in 
Thermidor, 347 

Dumouriez, described, 170-171 ; 
forces war, 1 74 ; first successes of, 
212 ; his defeat at Neerwinden, 
241 ; and treason, 242 

Duplay, described, 143 ; Robes- 
pierre enters house of, 143-145 ; 
elected to his section, 202; Robes- 
pierre in house of, in '94, 300- 
304 ; his farewell to Robespierre, 

330 
Duplay, Eleanor, see "Eleanor" 
Duplay, Nicholas, 320-321, and n. 



Edict, against refractory priests, 
186 

Education, of Robespierre, 50-54 

Egalite, execution of, 261 ; patron 
of Brissot, 166 

Eleanor Duplay, betrothed to Robes- 
pierre, 303 ; last walk with, 320 

Elections, of Arras, 67 ; of Robes- 
pierre to Paris, 203-205 

Elector, of Treves, 169 

Emperor, supposed letter of, 169 ; 
war declared against, 174 

English lady, addressed by Robes- 
pierre, 60 

Ercherolles, Mile, d', 267 



Family, of Robespierre, 40-48 ; 
probably Irish, 46 



384 



INDEX 



Families, of the Bevolution, 46-47 

Fanatics, nature of, 29-31 

Father of Eobespierre, see "Maxi- 
milian-Bartholomew " 

Fauchet, Bishop, 157 

Forn^ Bishop, 157 

Fouch^, recalled from Lyons, 311 ; 
conspires, 316, 319 

Fox, inn of, 70 



" Gallican Chukch " in possession 
of orders, 124 

Girondins, first appearance, 156- 
157 ; Eobespierre's antagonism 
to, 167; attack Robespierre, 181, 
211, 217, &c. ; main quarrel of, 
with Mountain, 204-207 ; their 
position in March 1 793, 236-238 ; 
their fall, 250 ; saved by Robes- 
pierre, 265 ; their end, 268 

Gorsas, 218 

Guadet, 172, 182 



HAMEL, preface, xiii ; quoted, 60 
n., 121 n., 202 n., 219 n. 

Handwriting, of Robespierre, 59, 
and n. 

Hanriot, in 2nd of June, 249; in 
Thermidor, 337-341 

Hapsburgs, 168 

Helvetius, his bust broken, 226 

Herbert, power of, 262 ; his anti- 
Christian movement, 279 ; his 
fall, 290 

Hoche, 304-305, and n. 

" Mors la lot I " 359-360 

Hotel de Ville, in Thermidor, 350- 

363 

House, of Duplay, see " Duplay " ; 
of Robespierres, at Arras, 44 



ISKABD, 159-161 



Jacobins, origin of, 82, 96-98; 
Mirabeau's last speech, 125-127 ; 
scene at, on 17th of July 1791, 
141 ; they applaud war, 161 ; 
great debate on war, 164-165 ; 
debate of Brissot and Robespierre 
in, 181-183 ; last speech of 
Robespierre at, and scene of 8th 
Thermidor, 321-322 ; closed by 
Legendre, 359 

Jews, Robespierre defends, 99 



Kbealio, Mademoiselle de, 57, also 
"Madame Robert," 143 n. 



Lafayette, attack on, in Jacobins, 
132 ; and Champ de Mars, 140- 
141 ; attempts to save crown, 
179 ; compared to Cromwell, 
182 ; exile and end of, 188 

Lally, Tollendal, and his son, 72, 
and n. 

Lebas, attempts to save Robes- 
pierre, 340; sacrifices himself, 
349 ; death, 360 

Lebas, ^Zs, 349 

Lecointre, a fool, 328 

Legendre, Danton's friend, shuts 
the Jacobins, 359 

Legislative Assembly, character of, 

147-153 

Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, 89 j 
his death, 328 

Letters, of Robespierre, to Buissart, 
77-79. 84 ; to Duplay, 156-157, 
" to my constituents " 

Lightning-rod, case of the, 64 

Louchet, decides moment of Robes- 
pierre's fall, 349 

Louis XVI., visits Robespierre's 
college, 53 ; and Mirabeau, 127- 
130 ; flight of, 136-137 ; intrigues 
for foreign aid, 164 ; reads de- 
claration of war, 174 ; a prisoner, 



INDEX 



385 



192 ; his trial and death, 220- 
232 
Louis 1« Grand, College of, 51, 

Loustalot, his absurdity, 117 



MACHBCOtTL, origin of Vendean 
War, 240 

Maillard, his appearance at Ver- 
sailles, 91-93 

Mairie, Robespierre handed to 
guard of, 356 

Malesherbes, 231, and n, 

Marat, author of the Massacres of 
September, 202 ; trial of, 247 ; 
death of, 260 

Marie Antoinette, name of Robes- 
pierre's godmother, 46 n. 

Marie Antoinette, Queen, writes, 
with BarnaTe, letter provoking 
war, 169 ; death of, 261 

Marly, forest of, 14 

Marriage, of Robespierre's parents, 
date of, 39 ; of Robespierre pro- 
posed, 65 ; again proposed with 
Mile. Duplay, 303 

Marseillaise, origin of, 177 

Martin Robespierre, see "Robes- 
pierre " 

Mass of Holy Ghost, opens Parlia- 
ment, 74 

Massacres, of September, 202-204 5 
of Champs de Mars, 143-145 

Maximilian, see " Robespierre " 

Maximilian - Bartholomew, tee 
" Robespierre " 

Maury, Abbe, 112-1x3, and ». 

Medal, tee "August" 

Merda, shoots Robespierre, 363 

Mirabeau, voice of, 10; and de 
Bt6z4i, 82 ; Robespierre opposes, 
120-121 ; last struggle and death 
of, 124-128 ; bust of, broken, 226 

Miranda, 240-241, and n. 

Monasticism, 113, and n. 



Monsieur, his reply to decree 
against emigrants, 159, and n. 

"Mouchoir du Pr^dicateur," verse 
of Robespierre, 61 

Mounier, on origin of Jacobins, 97, 
and n. 

Mountain, quarrel of, with Gironde, 
195 ; character of this quarrel, 
205-209 ; approached by con- 
spirators in Thermidor, 323 ; 
abandons Robespierre, 347 

Mountjoie, on origin of Jacobins, 97, 
and n. 

Napoleon, 284, 291 

Narbonne, 165, 170 

National Assembly, its general 

character, 69, &c. ; origin of the 

term, 75, and n. 
Neerwinden, defeat of Dumonriez 

at, 240 

OCTOBEB, march on Versailles, 91- 

93 
" Ophelia," Robespierre's verses to 

(probably English), 60 
Orleans, see "Egalit^" 



Palace, of Versailles, attack on, 
tee " October" ; of Tuilleries, at- 
tack on, see "August loth" 

Paris, elections of, to Convention, 
203-204 ; attitude of, during 
Thermidor, 350, 353, &c. 

Potion, 134, 137, 160, 258 

Prairial, law of, 310 

Priests, edict against refractory, 
186 

Protestants, Robespierre defends, 
99; see also "Jews" 



Refobmebs, general character of, 

4-5 



386 



INDEX 



R^nauld, C^cile, 307-308 

Revolution, generation of, 14-21 ; 
character of youth in, 37 ; nature 
of, 103-107 

Eobespierre, Robert de, 41 ; Yves 
de, 41 ; Martin de, 42 ; Maxi- 
milian (the elder), 42 ; Maxi- 
milian-Bartholomew, father of 
Robespierre, 45 ; his death, 49 

Robespierre, person of, 6-1 1 ; char- 
acter of, 13-18, 27-38 ; birth and 
descent of, 39-46 ; collateral 
descendants of, 48, and n. ; at 
college, 51-52 ; practises at bar, 
62-67 ; entry into States-General, 
69-75 ; ^ii* fi'^st speech, 76-77 ; 
joins the Breton Club, 80-81 ; 
first acquaintance with power in 
October 1789, 92-93 ; effect of 
Jacobins on, 96-98 ; first general 
attack on him in Parliament, 100 ; 
quarrel of, with Beaumetz, 107 ; 
growing popularity of, 108-109 ; 
St. Just first introduced to, 120 ; 
enters the household of Duplay, 
140-145 ; character of his posi- 
tion during Legislative, 152-153; 
revisits native province, 156-157 ; 
opposes war and Brissot, 163, 
181-183 ; is absorbed by Paris, 
196, 198 ; elected to Paris, 204 ; 
causes of his opposition to rivals, 

209 ; and of his later position, 

210 ; great attack upon, 213-218 ; 
Condorcet's description of, 219 ; 
demands death of the King, 225 ; 
and votes for, 229 ; enters the 
Committee of Public Safety, 256- 
257 ; saves the, 73, 265-266 ; 
abandons the Moderates and 
Desmoulins, 283-286 ; last dinner 
with Danton, 292 ; abandons 
Danton, 295 ; his idolaters in 
Duplay's house, 300-303 ; in the 
Feast of the Deity, 308-309 ; his 
last speech, 321-322 ; last morn- 



ing of, 330; fatal error of, on 
loth Thermidor, 345 ; arrested, 
349 ; joins the Revolt, 358 ; re- 
fuses insurrection, 362 ; is shot, 
363 ; is guillotined, 365 

Roland, Madame, 143, and n., 235 

"Rosati," 60 

Rosicrucians, lodge of, at Arras, 45 

Rousseau, his theory, character, 
and effect of, 24-27 

Roux, communist, 251 n. 

St. Faegeau, see " Lepelletier " 
St. Just, enters into Revolution, 
120 ; his appeal to the Gironde 
in the King's trial, 228, and n. ; 
enters Committee of Public 
Safety, 253 ; prepares Robes- 
pierre's entry thereto, 256 ; 
his report on the imprisoned 
Girondins, 258 ; notes received 
from Robespierre in report on 
Danton, 294 ; estranged from 
Robespierre, 293 ; during night 
of 8th Thermidor, 327-329; his 
attempt to save Robespierre on 
9th Thermidor, 332-334 ; is ar- 
rested, 349 
Social Contract, nature of theory 
of, 18-24 > Rousseau's pamphlet 
on, 25-27 

Tallibn, his mistress arrested, 
311 ; attacks Robespierre in Ther- 
midor, 334 

Temple, Robespierre deputed to 
guard, 203 

Terror, Robespierre's reluctance to 
face, 256 ; Danton troubled at> 
257 ; Robespierre admits, 270 et 
seq. 

Th^ot, Catherine, 307 

Therasson, proposes public meetings 
of the great Committee, 261 n. 

Theresa, see " Cabarrus" 



INDEX 



Z^7 



Thuriot, in Thermidor, 348, 349 
TrcTCs, see " Elector " 

Vadiee, in Thermidor, 343-344 
Valenciennes, besieged, 248 ; fall 

of, 259 ; Briez and, 264 
Vendee, rising of, 237, 240 
Vendome, Place, "Place des 

Piques," 202, 361 
Verdun, besieged, 203 
Vergniaud, his speech at King's 

trial, 227 ; attitude in March '93, 

239 ; death of, 268 
Versailles, Robespierre enters, 69; 

ill suited to him, 71, 93-96 
Vieux Cordelier, 277, 278, 283-285, 

28S 



Vilate and Robespierre, 309 
Virtues, of Robespierre, 34, &c. 
Vivier, at Jacobins on loth Ther- 
midor, 359 
Voice, of Robespierre, 10 



Waast, St., see "Abbey" 

War, declaration of great, against 
Austria, 174-175 ; against Eng- 
land and Holland, 234 

Wattiguies, 261 

Wimpfen, his reply to the CcDren- 
tion, 25i8 



TVES do Robespierre, 41 



BY HILAIRE BELLOC 

DANTON 

A Study* 440 pages. With portrait and notes, 8<vo, $2,50 





CONTENTS 




Preface 


I. 


The Revolution 


II. 


The Youth of Danton 


III. 


Danton at the Cordeliers 


IV. 


The Fall of the Monarchy 


V. 


The Republic 


VL 


The Terror 


VII. 


The Death of Danton 


VIII. 


Robespierre 




Appendices 




Index 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS 
From The Saturday Review 

*'Mr. Belloc's book is a most brilliant production, full of 
verve and eloquence, containing some passages of high literary 
merit. He makes his readers love Danton even if they cannot 
admire or believe in him. ' ' 

From Literature 
"Mr. Belloc has two qualifications for his task: First, he 
understands and loves France as no Englishman can under- 
stand and few love it — we would go so far as to say that he 
is the only English historian who has made the history of the 
Revolution and the character of the French people engaged in 
it real for us ; Secondly, he is a marvelous portrait painter." 

From The Spectator 
" A i)iece of real tragedy, given with admirable restraint and 
eloquence." 

From The Times 
" Brilliant ... of exceptional merit ... a book 
which is to be read with pleasure, and of which the author 
may be proud." 



DANTON, BY HILAIRE BELLOC 



From The Nation 
" Mr. Belloc's essay is unmistakably a clever piece of com- 
position in the broad style. It is always impulsive, often 
eloquent. ... It brings together in close combination the 
learning of the schools and a generous enthusiasm of youth, 
which warms to the aspirations of that ' tender-eyed, wandering, 
unfortunate Rousseau who died of persecution. ' " 

From The Dial 
" Mr. Belloc's ' Study ' of Danton is a more important con- 
tribution to the subject, for by his own independent investi- 
gations he has been able to control and occasionally to supple- 
ment his French predecessors. His treatment reveals vigorous 
thinking and clear conceptions of many of the characteristic 
features of the great struggle. There are passages of remark- 
able descriptive power." 

From The New York Tribune 
"It is on his record as a politician that he is honored in this 
book, and it is of a brave, skillful and sane struggle against 
circumstance that Mr. Belloc gives us, first and last, a vivid 
impression." 

From The Chicago Times-Herald 
*' Mr. Belloc has produced the first searching, exhaustive and 
profound study of Danton' s character and the reciprocal influ- 
ence existing between that character and its times and sur- 
roundings that has appeared in the English language. He 
has done more. He has written one of the most fascinating 
and at the same time well-rounded and masterful historical 
studies in existence — a monumental work that will be the last 
word and aji authority for many years to come." 

From The Brooklyn Eagle 
* 'A great story, admirably told. . . . Forms much the most 
notable contribution recently made to the now enormous mass 
of literature dealing with the greatest of modern epochs. To 
say that Mr. Belloc has painted a recognizable portrait of a 
remarkable man would be a totally inadequate estimate of his 
work. He has done far more. The figure on his canvas stands 
out in such bold outline and broad relief that we instinctively 
feel ourselves close to a great man." 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK 

Lh%'30 



